AN ALTERNATIVE ENLIGHTENMENT: THE MORAL OF

JEANNE MARIE LE DE BEAUMONT (1711-1780)

by

Margaret P. Schaller

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

August 2008 Copyright by Margaret P. Schaller 2008

ii AN ALTERNATIVE ENLIGHTENMENT: THE MORAL PHILOSOPHY OF

JEANNE MARIE LE PRINCE DE BEAUMONT (1711-1780)

By

Margaret P. Schaller

This dissertation was prepared under the direction of the candidate's dissertation advisor,

Dr. Jan Walsh Hokenson, Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Comparative

Literatures, and has been approved by the members of her supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor ofPhi1osophy.

Dr. obin N. Fiore, Committee Member

Dr. il!:!r: A.~er, Committee Member

Dr. Marcella L. Munson, Committee Member

~ nath Pendakur, Dean, The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

Dr. Barry T. osson, Dean, Graduate College

111 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the many professors, colleagues, and friends who have supported me in this academic achievement. In particular, I wish to acknowledge the continuing support and mentorship of my dissertation director and professor, Dr. Jan

Hokenson, whose outstanding scholarship and guidance have inspired me to reflect, to question, and to ')ust say it" during my masters and my doctoral studies at Florida

Atlantic University. I am also grateful to have an exceptional dissertation committee; Drs.

Marcella Munson, Robin Fiore, and Patricia Kollander have all been extremely generous with their time, their expertise, and their encouragement.

In addition, I would like to thank Florida Atlantic University, the Lifelong

Learning Society and the National Alumni Association for their recognition of my scholarship with several academic fellowships and scholarships. This funding provided financial and psychological support, helping to pay the bills but also encouraging me through that recognition to continue forward in the pursuit of this often daunting academic goal.

Finally, I would like to thank my closest supporters in this process. My wonderful children Emilie and Philippe, my brothers Tom and Peter, and my dear friends

Alessandra, Carolyn, Dennis, George, Lois, Mary, Pam, Rebecca, and Teresa, have all

iv played important roles in my life over these past four years. Their patience has been equal to their pride during these years of study, even when the subject itself escaped them.

Their ability to see my vision as it unfolded and then to remind me of it during my times of temporary blindness has been a critical part of my ultimate success. For this I am blessed and grateful.

v ABSTRACT

Author: Margaret P. Schaller

Title: An Alternative Enlightenment: The Moral Philosophy of

Jeanne Marie Le Prince de Beaumont (1711-1780)

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Jan Walsh Hokenson

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Year: 2008

The ceuvre of Jeanne Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, the public intellectual whose pedagogical journals and epistolary novels were routinely shelved in private eighteenth­ century libraries alongside the works of the period's most famous philosophes, today remains virtually unknown. Beyond the scant available studies limited to her pedagogy and fairy tales, it is time to explore the theoretical aspects of those and other of her texts as significant alternatives to traditional Enlightenment discourse as epitomized in the contemporary philosophes.

Through her personal roles of governess to British and French aristocracy, editor of a French-language periodical featuring such contributors as and Graffigny,

Vl and author of internationally recognized pedagogical manuals, the most famous of which included her timeless version of "Beauty and the Beast," Beaumont challenged a nascent female audience to actively participate in the intellectual discourse of their society, and used her real-world experience to develop a pedagogical methodology founded on the ideals of thought, debate, and action ("penser, parler, agir"). A Cartesian insistence on the separation of mind and body informed much of her argument in favor of women's intellectual capacity, and carried through to her discussion of such socio-political topics as women's equality, agrarian reform, religious tolerance, and social stratification. Not just a gatekeeper of information or a synthesizer of male-produced theories on education and other issues of social concern, she was rather an innovative thinker advancing active, personal commitment to public issues at all levels regardless of gender or social status.

Also, promoting theories rooted in the mentoring of women by women as a means of personal realization, Beaumont further advanced French Enlightenment universalism through debate, reason, and action.

vii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter I: A Climate of Change ...... 28

A. Enlightenment Women and the Public Sphere: The Salon ...... 32

B. Enlightenment Women and the Public Sphere: Beyond the Salon .... .43

C. The Missing Philosophes: Enlightenment Women in Print...... 52

D. The Modernist Viewpoint: Enlightenment Women and the Critics ... 61

Chapter II: The Feminine Voice ...... 79

A. Achieving Authorial Authority ...... 81

B. Portraying the Feminine Voice ...... 100

C. The Beaumont Difference: A Feminine Alternative ...... 110

Chapter III: Education: an Enlightened Alternative ...... 128

A. Education in the Eighteenth Century ...... 129

B. Beaumont's Objectives and Methodology ...... 150

C. Tales, Tasks, and Tools of the Trade ...... 158

Chapter IV: Alternatives in Enlightenment Social Consciousness ...... 170

A. The Religious Debate ...... 172

B. Enlightenment Social Morality ...... 190

viii C. Reform and Utopianism ...... 201

Conclusion: Beaumont's Alternative Enlightenment ...... 235

Bibliography ...... 250

IX Introduction

In the 1770s, the typical French author of some renown would have held royal court positions, published philosophical debates, edited scholarly periodicals, written scores of volumes in many genres and with numerous , and frequently traveled abroad. Most scholars and critics today, partly responsible for this stereotype, would quickly adduce Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, or many other well-known philosophes of 's Enlightenment period as exemplars of this heroic figure in the history of Western thought. Few people realize that several eighteenth-century women also meet or exceed this impressive list of accomplishments, although in their time- as in ours - cultural authorities tended to discount them. Emilie du Chatelet' s groundbreaking work in physics and mathematics was overshadowed by her love affair with Voltaire, even as Madeleine de Puisieux's controversial philosophical writings were regularly attributed to her famous lover Diderot. These women writers and a handful of others like

Fran~oise de Graffigny, Felicite de Genlis, and Isabelle de Charriere, have recently begun to attract attention from an international movement to recover women's history, slowly revitalizing interest in them through biographies, histories, and critical analyses of their ' works. One other such woman is Jeanne Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, still very much

1 overlooked and yet, I will argue, surpassing even Chatelet and Graffigny in public influence. This extraordinary individual, whose pedagogical journals and epistolary novels were routinely shelved in private eighteenth-century libraries alongside the works of Voltaire and Rousseau, and who played an influential role in European thought and behavior well into the nineteenth century, is now almost unknown. 1

This study reviews the complete oeuvre of Mme Le Prince de Beaumont, who published more than seventy volumes during her thirty-two year career as educator and public intellectual. There is limited published research available on this woman, whom

Joan Hinde Stewart describes as "catalogued but not studied" ("Novelists and Their

Fictions" 199). This analysis broadens the scope of that research and advances the recognition of this woman as a noteworthy thinker whose intellectual contribution to eighteenth-century debates deserves inclusion in the canon of Enlightenment discourse.

Beaumont created works of fiction and non-fiction, authored essays and epistolary novels, and published what are now recognized as the first educational magazines for children.2 In France, where she first lived and was trained as a teacher, she served as a governess to royals and aristocrats, a trade that she marketed in London from 1748 to

1763, focusing primarily on works of pedagogy during this period. After returning to

France for the last seventeen years of her life, she turned more exclusively to novels and, ultimately, religiously oriented writings in various genres. During her lengthy period of literary production, Beaumont developed a moral philosophy that did more than just promote her personal ideals. Her works of debate and dissent stressed strategies for active participation, challenging readers to understand social causes, to question the status quo, and to involve themselves in the correction of a world that, in her opinion, needed

2 improvement.

In my view, the few contemporary critics who mention Beaumont have overlooked or underestimated the importance of this author and her contribution to the

Enlightenment in Europe. No one addresses her entire body of work. Beaumont's far­ reaching arguments are typically reduced to one, as in Servanne Woodward's paraphrase,

"women must entertain their husbands and fuel their marital conversations. Therefore, women must cultivate their minds, learn how to be accountants, and read" (Preface, ix).

Two centuries earlier, a mocking Voltaire had belittled Beaumont in a letter of 1767 reducing her to someone who "fait des especes de catechismes pour les jeunes demoiselles" (makes little catechisms for young ; qtd. in Artigas-Menant, Les

Lumieres 291 ). 3

Using her texts as primary source, this study has juxtaposed Beaumont's positions on four major topics- education, social concerns, religious beliefs, and women's equality

- with similar themes in the works of several of her most prominent contemporaries, chiefly in Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, those recognized today as the

French Enlightenment's dominant philosophes. Those comparisons, along with modern critics' studies of these writers and their period, provide the baseline for defining the distinctive voice of Beaumont. Through that extensive comparison, Beaumont emerges as a moral philosopher contributing an independent and often alternative perspective to that of male Enlightenment thinkers. She is also be seen as part of the historical lineage of such women intellectuals as Christine de Pizan, Madame de Lafayette, and her own contemporaries Emilie du Chatelet and Fran~oise de Graffigny, as well as precursor to such later eighteenth-century female authors as Felicite de Genlis, Anne de Miremont,

3 and Isabelle de Charriere. In fact, Beaumont figures as a resource for contemporary discourse in these four critical areas of debate, in part because her works exemplify the eighteenth-century understanding of moral philosophy, far more comprehensive than our modern-day delineation. Alice Laborde provides a clear summary of that period's characterization of this concept:

Le terme 'moraliste,' au dix-huitieme siecle, implique I' etude de l'ethique,

bien sur, mais aussi ce que nous avons !'habitude de considerer comme

appartenant aux domaines de la psychologie, de la sociologie, des

politique, et, par extension, a la pedagogie; ce qui repond a un champ de

connaissances infiniment plus vaste. (43)

The term 'moralist' in the eighteenth century implies the study of ethics,

of course, but also that which we usually consider as being part of the

fields of psychology, sociology, political , and, by extension, of

pedagogy; this corresponds to a much wider field of knowledge.

This broader perspective will underlie my use of the term moral philosophy in discussions of both eighteenth-century issues and their direct correlation to ongoing contemporary debates in the philosophy of moral development.

Overview of Beaumont's Publications

Today Beaumont is primarily recognized, if at all, for the children's tales she popularized. Her version of "Beauty and the Beast" is described by Stewart as "without doubt the best-known work of fiction published by any woman in the eighteenth century"

(Gynographs 26). She is thus often incorrectly pigeon-holed in the category of pedagogue, even though much of her writing broached a broad expanse of socio-political

4 issues.

Beaumont began her literary career in France in 1748, toward the end of her residency in Luneville and her employment as governess at the courts of the Duke

Leopold - nephew of Louis XIV by marriage - and then of Stanislas Leszynski, former

King of Poland and father-in-law of Louis XV. That year the young philosopher Abbe

Gabriel Fran~ois Coyer published his essay L'Annee merveilleuse (1748), a social satire written to bring attention to the foppish attire and behavior of mid-century men. Coyer claims that a forthcoming astrological event will bring about a reversal of roles, causing men to lose their masculine characteristics and to take on those of women. This male­ female metamorphosis, he predicts, will create a disastrous situation for men when they become like women. Beaumont responds with her Lettre en reponse a "L'Annee merveilleuse" (1748), ostensibly written by a woman to a woman, commenting on the tragedy that it would be for women to lose their superior traits in exchange for the less desirable ones of men. The following year she publishes the Arrest Solomnel de la nature, a sequel essay in which she recounts her dream-like encounter with a figure she ultimately identifies as Nature. In this dream, she petitions Nature to obtain a one-year delay in the role-reversal process announced by Coyer, thus allowing women a year in which to correct their frivolous behavior, reinhabit the fullness of their God-given characteristics, and return to their rightful place in society, thereby depriving men of the reversal - and the acquisition of women's superior qualities - they so desire.

These two essays demonstrate Beaumont's ideal of parity for women, coupled with esprit or clever wit, characteristics that will be found in nearly all of her texts over the next three decades and that articulate the spirit of feminist vigor that dominates her

5 early works in particular. These include her novels Le Triomphe de la verite (1748),

Civan, roi de Bungo (1754), her two-volume Lettres diverses et critiques (1750), and her periodical publication Le Nouveau magasinfranr;ais (1750-52), a compilation of fiction, critical and scholarly essays (it was also referred to as the Magasin des ). Each of these works demonstrates, in the female protagonists they feature, a sense of intellectual capacity to confront, debate, and resolve social and moral issues. Whether in the seamless transition of mentors in Civan, where Dulica assumes the complex educational development of young Prince Civan upon her husband's untimely death, in the rebuttal of misogynistic directives given by a father to his daughter's tutor in the Lettres diverses et critiques, or in the confident voice of Beaumont herself regarding her own ability to compile, edit, and publish the monthly volumes of the Nouveau magasinfranr;ais, the reader of these early works hears clearly the voice ofwomen andfor women that

Beaumont strenuously emphasizes.

Beaumont's relocation from the provincial French court at Luneville to the aristocratic circles of London in 1748 reordered dominant themes in her writings.

Shocked at the misguided priorities of English parents, the lack of training for instructors, and the obsolete methodology of pedagogy in general, Beaumont attacked such education with energy. During the almost fifteen years of her British residency, she wrote no fewer than twenty-one volumes, predominantly on the subject of how to educate young women and girls. The first socially diagnostic work appeared in 1750 as part of the Lettres diverses et critiques, whose first volume is comprised of letters addressing - among other subjects- inequalities in young women's education, and then devotes half of the second volume to Beaumont's detailed "Traite sur 1' education." In 1756 the Magasin des

6 Enfants, the first of her series of pedagogical journals, promptly attracted international attention, and it remains her most famous creation.4 Beaumont is in fact considered today by such noted critics as Patricia Clancy and Jill Shefrin as the creator of the children's educational magazine. Using a dialogue format to animate pedagogical lessons of history, morality, religion, and other schoolroom topics, she followed the Magasin des Enfants

( 17 56, four volumes) with the Magasin des adolescentes ( 17 60, four volumes), Anecdotes du quatorzieme siecle ( 17 60, two volumes), Principes de l 'histoire sainte ( 17 61, three volumes), and Instructions pour les jeunes dames qui entrent dans le monde ( 17 64, four volumes). These pedagogical texts, designed to engage children, adolescents, and their adult mentors in the process of active learning, are meant to supplement, or more precisely to enhance the materials used in her hands-on experiences with her students, experiences that included student-teacher conversations, games of interactive role-play, and- her own innovation- dissected maps (puzzle-like geographic maps made from colored wooden pieces cut apart like jigsaw puzzles and shaped like the countries, regions, or continents being studied). These materials, which will be discussed in detail in

Chapter 3, contributed to the popularity of Beaumont's pedagogical methods, and their success most certainly accounts for the critical and historical focus on this aspect of her intellectual production.

Returning to France in 1763 did not slow the rhythm of Beaumont's writing, but it did once again reorient her choice of subjects and genres. She explained her departure from London as health-related, and Barbara Kaltz quotes her describing her "sante ... toujours delicate" (always delicate health) in a letter to a student (xi). Her early years in the Savoyard countryside saw the publication of three epistolary novels in a three-year

7 period: Lettres d'Emerance a Lucie (1765), Memoires de Madame de Batteville, ou la veuve parfaite (1766), and La Nouvelle Clarice, histoire veritable (1767). Although

Beaumont had previously published one epistolary novel, Lettres de Madame du Montier ala Marquise de ***, safille, first as a series in her periodical Nouveau magasinfram;;ais

(1750) and then as a separate two-volume text (1756), she appears in the 1760s to have embraced this epistolary mode that was enjoying widespread popularity among all types and levels of readers, particularly women. This change of genre represents a significant shift in conception and technique, allowing Beaumont to reach an audience quite different from the young adults and children of the rather elite families targeted by her pedagogical magazines. In these three epistolary texts the letter format allows her both to introduce characters, themes, and social situations and to allow for debates among the characters, producing thought-provoking arguments on topics of civic concern to readers.

Each novel entails a complex plot that explores subjects of historical actuality ranging from contemporary education to foreign policy strategies, from arranged marriages to land-use reform, from containing the plague to crowning the , demonstrating

Beaumont's command of important contemporary issues.

From the beginning, all of her work emphasizes the Christian faith as a crucial source for personal, social, and intellectual development. Indeed, in her last texts the intense focus on the Catholic faith is so sharp, and her voice so strident that other subjects are all but eclipsed. Magasin des pauvres, artisans, domestiques, et gens de la campagne

(1768), Les Americaines, ou la preuve de la religion chretienne par les lumieres naturelles (1770), Contes moraux (1774), Nouveaux contes moraux (1776), and her final text La Devotion eclairee (1781), all reflect a profound sense of commitment to Christian

8 teachings and their application in daily life. The first two texts and the last one recur to the dialogue format of which Beaumont was once so fond, to conversations between young people and adults that retrace scriptural stories, sectarian beliefs, and modes of applying Christian principles in the daily lives of the faithful. Here a deep familiarity with the Bible is evident, and Beaumont's characters enact broad if sometimes inaccurate representations of various Christian denominations as well as several of the non-Christian faiths prominent in eighteenth-century Europe. This all-inclusive approach is particularly characteristic of the six-volume collection Les Americaines, in which the narrator's young students pretend to be uneducated but clearly not unintelligent North American women in France, trying to comprehend world religions. This role play allows the students to ask the most nai've questions they can imagine, challenging preconceived notions and dogma. Although Catholicism always wins the argument in Beaumont's texts as the true representative of Christ's church founded by Saint Peter, the deliberations along the way dramatize her insistence on global communication and tolerance as essential parts of religious training.

The Modern Recovery of Eighteenth-Century Women's Texts

To rethink the legacy of Beaumont's extensive corpus of written works requires setting aside characterizations of eighteenth-century women authors as shallow and romantic, steeped only in children's tales, domestic trivia, and affairs of the heart.

Reading her afresh, we find topics like agrarian reform and political governance that defy the stereotypes that continue to permeate contemporary criticism of women's writings in general, and Beaumont's works in particular. The characters that populate her novels, journals, tracts, and fictive letters not only discuss matters of domestic import but also

9 show an explicit understanding of the complex concepts being detailed in contemporary geography, history, sciences, mathematics, and the civic, legal, and political matters of their day.

The type of alternate analysis of eighteenth-century women's texts that I am undertaking is a relatively recent phenomenon. Launched by in

1949, it gathered steam with the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s with such studies as English Showalter's A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from

Bronte to Lessing (1977) and Nancy K. Miller's The Heroine's Text: Readings in the

French and English Novel, 1722-1782 (1980), and crested in the recent international explosion of period and gender studies. Yet during this relatively recent period of critical history, even Miller's 1988 writings still indicated some trepidation in, as Servanne

Woodward describes it, "introducing women authors to the French literary 'canon"'

(Woodward, Preface vii). This initial uncertainty has been largely overcome, and both

American and European feminist critics have begun to focus on women's texts missing from the Enlightenment canon, but much ground remains to be covered if we are to overcome centuries of omission. Several problems persist. For instance, although the number of studies on eighteenth-century women authors continues to expand, resources for historical and critical materials remain limited or very difficult to access. Many original manuscripts and much period correspondence remain untranslated, unpublished, or unarchived, making research difficult and historical data often conflicting and unreliable.

Recent studies of several significant eighteenth-century women authors have produced a more stable basis of documentation, and depict the contributions made by

10 these women to the promotion of Enlightenment thought in the eighteenth century.

Elisabeth Badinter on Emilie du Chatelet and Louise d'Epinay (Madame du Chatelet,

Madame d'Epinay: Ou l'Ambitionfeminine au XVII/e siecle, 2006), English Showalter on

Fran~oise de Graffigny (Fram;oise de Graffigny: Her Life and Works, 2004), and

Jacqueline Letzer on Isabelle de Charriere (Intellectual Tacking: Questions of Education in the Works of Isabelle de Charriere, 1998), are representative ofthis new research activity, and all such work contributes greatly to the ongoing recovery of these authors.

Although some of these texts are principally historical biographies of the authors and their contemporaries, many entail thematic studies of major topical themes predominant in eighteenth-century texts, typically including love, marriage, friendship, and family relations.

Two scholars in particular represent the developing trend in early modem women's studies. Joan DeJean and Samia Spencer focus on a select group of women authors whose long unacclaimed works were originally considered both thoughtful and relevant to the changing discourse of their periods. DeJean's Tender Geographies (1991) examines several influential seventeenth-century women authors in a socio-political framework, analyzing their role in the creation and then the widespread distribution of the newly popularized genre of the novel. An overarching thematic of sexual equality bridges

DeJean's analyses of women authors, and she consistently reminds the reader of the need to challenge the traditional modes of study applied to these texts and to question such seemingly obvious notions as marriage, the marriage contract, and the role of the married woman in home and society. Although her objects of analysis are primarily women's social environments, DeJean breaks out of the critical stereotypes, chiefly by historically

11 contextualizing her subjects and in turn highlighting a discourse that goes beyond simple emotional concerns to enact the broader, more intense intellectual debate once obvious in these texts. Using the same methods of critical examination found in studies by such period experts as Paul Benichou and Isaiah Berlin, DeJean places her subjects in their contextual milieu, uses their writings to illuminate the social scenes they inhabit, and thus adds a new socio-intellectual dimension for their interpretation. Similarly, DeJean connects the circumstances of life and the development of thought, as traced through the writings of the authors, in her delineations of seventeenth-century women. Described by

Michele Bissiere as a "dense, challenging book [that] compels us to rethink the

'sentimental' label attached to women's novels," DeJean's work is an essential base for any study of early-modern women's writings in France and indeed in Europe.

Samia Spencer and her team of scholars spent five years compiling French

Women and the (1984), an anthology that presents women's writings as essential to the understanding of social thought in the eighteenth century.

Dividing her study into sections ("Women and Political Life," "Women and Society,"

"Women and Culture") allows Spencer's authors to comment afresh on themes that link women to crucial issues of Enlightenment discourse, as codified by such critics as Ernst

Cassirer (The Philosophy of the Enlightenment 1932), Rene Pomeau (Voltaire 1955), and

Jean Starobinski (Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparence de ['obstacle 1971). Those three now canonical analysts of the eighteenth century, focusing on the move from

Classicism toward Enlightenment, constructed those rubrics that Spencer then broadened to include the women's work in that period. Like DeJean's study, Spencer's compilation of essays enables readers to note the variety of ways in which women writers entered the

12 spheres of discursive influence occupied by men.

Scholarly Work on Beaumont

In 1946, Jean Marie Robain published the first modem biographical sketch of

Beaumont, "Mme Leprince de Beaumont, grand-mere de Merimee et inspiratrice de

Cocteau." The article's title suggests immediately its historical inaccuracies (she was

Merimee's great grandmother) and fawning admiration, much of which remains in his full-length biography of Beaumont (2004 ). Robain portrays Beaumont as ostensibly attaining credibility only in relation to the men who give it to her: her great-grandson, the author Prosper Merimee, and the French film director Jean Cocteau who popularized her

"Beauty and the Beast" in his film (1946). The second article appeared in 1952, when the noted literary scholar Femand Baldensperger took a brief look at Beaumont's pedagogical methods as represented in the novel Civan, but his primary focus was the foreignness of the story's setting in sixteenth-century Japan and France. These two sketches, along with an undocumented, hagiographic biography self-published by Marie­

Antoinette Reynaud in 1971, were the only studies of Beaumont available to twentieth­ century scholars until Jean Sgard's Dictionnaire desjournalistes (1976) presented a short biography and summarized her journalistic publications. The entry was written by

Patricia Clancy, who followed it with her own essay "Mme Leprince de Beaumont:

Founder of Children's Literature in France" three years later in the Australian Journal of

French Studies. Both pieces focus on the difficulties of her life, the religious aspect of her works, and on her role as editor and publisher of journals, periodicals, and magazines.

In spite of a somewhat negative tone in the Dictionnaire article, Clancy opened the door to a growing awareness of Beaumont, her works, and her importance as a

13 participant in eighteenth-century thought. Clancy's article from 1979 credits Beaumont with the creation of a new field of literature, designed specifically for children. Clancy's third article, "A French Writer and Educator in England" (1982), is most often cited by scholars today, for in it Clancy not only analyzes Beaumont's innovations in teaching, pointing out her desire to bring education to the neglected female student population, but also highlights "a life-long preoccupation not only with women's role in the family, but also with their intellectual and social potential" (195). Clancy discusses the variety of works Beaumont published during her British sojourn, and applauds her innovation in combating the educational abandonment of girls. Comparing her to the later Mary

W ollstonecraft, Clancy suggests apropos of both women that "most important of all they did not hesitate to rush into print to the defense of their sex against attackers like

Rousseau or Dr. Gregory" (206). Clancy inaugurates, then, a broader approach to

Beaumont and her work than had been the case for decades.

As the attention to eighteenth-century women's writing heightened in the 1980s and children's literature began to attract academic interest as well, awareness of

Beaumont increased somewhat among scholars. Anthologies indexing women's texts suggested more complex theses than casual readings had previously noted, and historians began to document such forgotten authors as Beaumont. Suzanna van Dijk's Traces de femmes (1988) and Nina Gelbart's Feminism and Opposition Journalism (1987) are excellent examples of this awareness taking shape, both studies focusing on the roles of women and journalism during the eighteenth-century. Although Gelbart highlights one magazine in particular, Le Journal des dames, both critics are interested in those who published the journals and those who read them. Each mentions Beaumont and her

14 magazines -both the series of Magasins and the more intellectual Nouveau Magasin fram;;ais- as examples of what women produced and how the market received their publications. In modern academic circles, as such historical examinations of areas previously dominated by men's writings became more prevalent, Beaumont's name became associated with these new types of inquiry, but familiarity with the actual content of her work remained extremely limited.

Betsy Hearne's Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale

(1989) was one of the first studies on Beaumont that singled out an individual text for analysis. Participating in a renewed scholarly interest in the fairy tale, Hearne opted for the most famous of Beaumont's short stories, and defined her research objective as less analytical than structural, characterizing it as "a study of the art and artifice of the story rather than an analysis of its meaning ... paying more attention to the forms of the story's regeneration than to its interpretation" (xiv). It is not surprising that she dismisses the majority of Beaumont's main text of the Magasin des Enfants, describing Beauty and the Beast as "buried in the midst of tedious, didactic conversations among figures such as

Mrs. Affable and Witty" (2). This lack of attention to or outright dismissal of

Beaumont's overall oeuvre is not uncommon, and biographical descriptions of her are far more frequent than scholarly criticism. Robain's Madame Leprince de Beaumont intime

(2004), noted earlier, is one such example. Jill Shefrin's Such Constant Affectionate Care

(2003) also provides substantial biographical data on Beaumont's life during her time as governess in England and mentor to the royal governess Lady Charlotte Finch, and explores Beaumont's pedagogical contributions. All those scholars, however, both historians and critics, tend to belabor the gaps and blanks in her biography more than the

15 specifics of her texts. Although historical data rather than literary analysis also dominates the work of Genevieve Artigas-Menant, her recent studies of Beaumont's biographical data provide much-needed accuracy for the contextualization of the historical figure even if they add little to our appreciation of her writings. Yet where Hearne unfortunately dismisses of the majority of Beaumont's texts, Artigas-Menant is at least intent on providing definitive biographical information. "Pourquoi alors la distinguer de la sorte

[comme une 'enigme']? Parce que ses biographes, ses reuvres et sa correspondance attirent !'attention sur ce qu'on peut veritablement appeler une 'enigme"' (Why then single her out in this way [as an 'enigma']? Because her biographies, her works, and her correspondence call attention to what can truly be called an enigma; "Femmes des lumieres" 291 ). This article helps greatly to fill in the unknowns surrounding such personal issues as Beaumont's marriages, affairs, and offspring, and thus mitigate the recurrence of erroneous information in studies on Beaumont.

Ironically, it is academic studies of fairy tales that now increasingly entail major sections on Beaumont and her stories from the Magasin des Enfants. Sophie Raynaud's

La seconde preciosite: floraison des conteuses (2002) is, in my opinion, one of the most important recent studies, resituating the fairy tale as an extension of "precieux" novels used by women authors to emphasize feminine heroism, through such themes of preciosite as love, marriage, and education. Raynaud's second objective is to elevate the female authors of those fairy tales as worthy of canonical recognition equal to their novelistic counterparts. She thus launches the restorative process for the conteuses, including Beaumont, that I will further in this study. Although she devotes only a fraction of her work to Beaumont, and her analysis is limited to the fairy tales, Raynard's

16 insistence on the originality of her authors, both in their unique use of this literary genre and in their feminist motifs, is a crucial step forward in eighteenth-century studies.

As to scholarly studies of Beaumont's work as a whole, the most in-depth criticism dates from only 1993. Of primary importance is a chapter in Gynographs

(1993), a period study by Joan Hinde Stewart, one of the first contemporary scholars to focus specifically on eighteenth-century women literary authors as important and substantial contributors to Enlightenment thought. Stewart approaches their texts historically to begin stripping away generations of misconceptions about the value of these texts as anything more than frivolous love stories or digressive gossip. She examines the early and most overtly feminist of Beaumont's works, Lettre en reponse a

"L 'Annee merveilleuse" ( 1748), and then comments in detail on three of her epistolary novels, Lettres de Madame du Montier (1750, 1756), Memoires de Madame la baronne de Batteville (1766), and La Nouvelle Clarice (1767). Stewart addresses the moralizing nature of Beaumont's writing, while also embracing her dialogues "not just about women, but for women," finding in her works a "mission ... not to change society, but to elevate the female sex" (29). Some of Stewart's assumptions do not hold up when applied to the complete body of Beaumont's work, when, for example she states that the "mother­ daughter relation is consistently privileged in Beaumont's novels, usurping the customary position of relations between men and women" (47), an argument that cannot withstand a reading of Civan (1754) or Triomphe de la verite (1748), both stories about young men.

Yet the feminine empowerment that Stewart repeatedly touches upon in her brief study is critical to understanding the significant contribution Beaumont is making to

Enlightenment discourse in general. Stewart establishes Beaumont and the other women

17 of her study as thoughtful and critical participants in formulating and articulating the ideologies of their social environment, and unwraps the concerns that most directly touched these women's daily lives- marriage, children, education, religion, and family.

She makes clear the importance of these issues for women to explore and to critique, since they are so crucial to the very existence of these authors and their compatriotes, struggling to find a sense of those same rights that men were ready to accord themselves.

Even Stewart's thematic approach, however, perpetuates the critical convention of defining women's writings as steeped only in what Raynard characterized as "precieux" topics. That optic was challenged as too restrictive by Alessa Johns. Her Women's

Utopias of the Eighteenth Century (2003) instead explores the importance of feminine reactions to broad social ills in Enlightenment Europe, as represented by women writers through proposed utopian communities of their own literary design. Tracing what she sees as a migratory initiative by eighteenth-century women beginning in Britain, Johns discusses specific works by five women whose texts focus on communities offering manageable operational solutions for many of the social and economic dilemmas facing their nations. Her discussion of Beaumont, the sole French woman included, focuses on the novel La Nouvelle Clarice (1767) and the community that its heroine outlines to her mother. Johns rightly positions these two characters as eighteenth-century women who

"directed their focus on the plight of women and other subalterns and sought ways to use emerging socioeconomic ideas, along with Christian beliefs, to propose a fairer society"

(18). She deftly uses Beaumont's text to illustrate the author's familiarity with the serious social issues of taxation, depopulation, and economic reform, and she emphasizes what she terms the "communal reproduction model" to demonstrate these women's practical

18 yet gradualist solutions to those preoccupations of the period. Although she limits her study of Beaumont to one text only, Johns sets the stage for the broader perspective that I will develop in interpreting texts that span chronological boundaries and literary genres, including her Lettres de Madame de Montier et de La Marquise de *** safille (1750,

1756), Civan (1754), the Magasin des pauvres (1768), and the Contes Moraux (1774). In such an expanded analysis, Beaumont's delineation of these idyllic communities interweaves pedagogy, religious instruction, and all manner of intellectual discourse to achieve the social reform she believes quite attainable through the application of her methods.

In the format of concise introductions to reprints of single texts, Alix Deguise and

Barbara Kaltz have provided unusually astute comments on Beaumont's methods and significance. After a brief introduction to the author, Deguise offers the reader an in­ depth look into the contextual import of Civan, roi de Bungo (1754, reedited 1998) and its "exotic" nature, using Baldensperger' s expression. Noting the old topos of using foreign settings to criticize French society, as in Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721) and Graffigny's Lettres d'une Peruvienne (1747), Deguise insists on the originality and the importance of Beaumont's selection of Japan as her point of departure and return. The detailed breakdown of socio-political events in Japan from 1560-1640 (the period addressed in Civan) reveals Beaumont's obvious knowledge of world events, her capacious ability to provide historical interpretations, and her keen desire to interface them with current events in . For example: "Comme [l'economiste] Turgot, Mme

Leprince de Beaumont jugeait la reforme des impots indispensable" (Like [the economist] Turgot, Mme Leprince de Beaumont considered tax reform to be essential;

19 xix). Thus situating the work among its contemporaries, Deguise isolates Beaumont's primary pedagogical, political, and philosophical positions.

Barbara Kaltz also uses the context of a reprint of Beaumont's writings to introduce readers to seven of Beaumont's short texts. In Contes et autres ecrits (2000),

Kaltz introduces the works selected as representative of the complete oeuvre. Though narrowed by the focus on individual texts, Kaltz aptly connects Beaumont's writings to the historical works that inspired them so that the reader perceives both the source of

Beaumont's style, method, or genre and also her originality in comparison to those sources. Writing about the Education complete, for example, she suggests that it is

"directement inspire de l'Histoire ancienne de Charles Rollin, dont Mme de Beaumont utilisait sans doute elle-meme les ouvrages, fort populaires a l'epoque" (inspired directly by Charles Rollin's l'Histoire ancienne, whose works, extremely popular at the time,

Mme de Beaumont no doubt made use of; 21). Kaltz rightly suggests Beaumont's connection to the intellectual movements of her time and place, though her range of material is still quite limited and some conclusions are therefore skewed, as we shall see.

Still, such re-publications help heighten interest in Beaumont and her works, although these are available only in French at this time.

The few other articles that have appeared in recent journals and anthologies on

Beaumont will be referred to within this study, and require no particular review. Period surveys by Jean Bloch and Martin Hall address the educational methodologies of

Beaumont, like similar studies of Beaumont and education by Servanne Woodward and

Birgitta Berglund-Nilsson. Limited in scope, these essays provide a very general glimpse into the depth and breadth of Beaumont's literary work.

20 Structure and Methodology

The following study draws upon this groundwork of published research to expand the focus on Beaumont from her life to her work, and to amplify the critical focus from individual texts to the overarching effect of her oeuvre on eighteenth-century thought, including its legacy in the present day. Thus examining her authorial objectives alongside the philosophical trends, historical influences, and contextual shifts that comprised her own experience, I reinsert her into her historical context as an Enlightenment thinker.

Such a contextual perspective highlights, for example, the topics of social justice and morality that Beaumont addresses by contrasting the tangible examples of personal activities in the Contes Moraux (1774) with the more figurative way they are presented twenty-four years earlier in the Lettres diverses et critiques (1750): certain changes in her country of residence, her employment status, her personal contacts, juxtaposed with the historical context in which she evolved, shape the content and emphasis of Beaumont's texts, at any stage. This study thus charts the discursive development of Beaumont as philosopher, educator, social reformer, and citizen, centered on her distinct contributions to the period's intellectual movements and ultimately to our own thought today.

Taking a historical approach to Beaumont's work, I group texts in chronological order to facilitate a contextualization of her discourse. Denis Hollier has summarized this process as writing literary history:

Whether ... to demonstrate literature's independence of any contextual

influence, its enforced responsiveness to what occurs in its surroundings,

or its evolution according to its own laws ... literary history require[s]

21 that it always be clear what is inside and what outside, where literature

starts and where it ends, where one enters and where one leaves literature.

(xxv)

That is, unless analysis situates the reader in the socio-historical context of a work

(Hollier's "outside") and then gives the text an equally distinct role as device within that context, capable of creating its own developmental context (the "inside"), the full potential of the analysis and its importance to literary history will be incomplete.

Analyzing Beaumont's writings from this perspective, the first chapter below situates Beaumont's "outside" environment by exploring the relevant aspects of

Enlightenment debate, a term I characterize as the determination of the eighteenth­ century members of the Republic of Letters to give all people -men and women, aristocrats and -access to the knowledge they craved. With the context of her period laid out, the last three chapters are directed more specifically at the works of

Beaumont herself. These chapters will group Beaumont's works into the four major categories cited above- education, social responsibility, religion, and women's rights. I position her texts against the period's most urgent issues, and address the significance of those issues in the period debates outlined in the first chapter. Comparative textual analysis demonstrates their importance as literary achievements, as historical documents, and as works of moral philosophy meant to provoke readers' personal reflection and to encourage material application. In each chapter, the role that Beaumont gives to personal involvement in real solutions to be implemented by her audience is stressed as critical to the principles of this femme philosophe (an ostensibly modern term actually introduced in

1748 by the playwright Jacques Teisserenc in his rarely performed play of the same

22 name). Like Diderot's Encyclopedie (1751-1772) and its introduction of praxis as value, for Beaumont the philosophical was most effective when supported by the practical.

Thus the first chapter below, in order to establish the baseline for this study of

Beaumont by situating women in the Enlightenment environment, examines the salon and its role as a venue for women's access to the discourse of their day. This section also discusses alternate avenues of literary access that women utilized effectively during the eighteenth century. These include, most significantly, the roles of novelist and journalist adopted by several women whose work was regarded with interest and, for the most part, admiration. A close look at several of these women will help to expand the overview of the feminine author's situation. Those women include Madeleine de Puisieux, Fran~oise de Graffigny, Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, Emilie du Chatelet, and Sarah Fielding. The first chapter ends with a review of several canonical critics of Enlightenment issues and the comparative positions of more recent criticism, in particular on the topic of gender in the cultural context of the period.

The second chapter reflects on Beaumont's early texts, and on her role as a female author, educator, and social commentator in the male-dominated climate of the

Enlightenment. Beaumont spent ten years (1725-35) in a Norman convent school for young women, receiving her own education, followed by several years of teaching experience, training that allowed her to seek positions as governess to the royal family at the court of Luneville. There she was tutor to Elizabeth Therese, Louis XIV' s niece who would become the wife of King Emmanuel of Sardinia in 1737. Yet when Beaumont lost that position with the marriage of her charge, and found herself alone with the support of her child in the mid 1740s, she turned to writing to support herself. First came the essays

23 Lettre en reponse a "L 'Annee Merveilleuse" and L 'Arrest Solomnel, and the novel

Triomphe de la verite, all published in 1748. Two years later she published the two­ volume Lettres diverses et critiques. Yet Beaumont pushed further in the field of writing when, in January 1750, she introduced the first volume of the Nouveau magasin

Franr;ois, a monthly journal that included philosophical, religious, scientific, and literary commentaries. The second chapter traces how Beaumont uses this monthly journal and her other early texts to position women as conscious proponents of non-traditional behavior in a traditional society. In such ways, chapter two establishes the strengths and merits of Beaumont's women (including the author herself) and, through their roles in her earliest texts, defines the common characteristics that dominate the early feminist voice of her work.

The third chapter addresses education and pedagogy in the Enlightenment, particularly in Beaumont's eighteenth-century English environment. A sketch of

Beaumont's own background of French convent instruction and her subsequent mentoring of French royals underscores her reaction to the contrasting circumstances she must have confronted in London, where pedagogical practices were more limited and ill­ defined. As I show, Beaumont reacted by producing a structured plan for pedagogical improvement. Her primary method- the dialogue - offers an interactive and engaging format, first suggested by Plato and such successors as Fenelon and Locke, and aimed at provoking questions and encouraging personal reasoning. Extracting elements from earlier systems of instruction, she updates and contextualizes them into her own system, which she adapts to the needs of her students. Beyond examining this instructional methodology, chapter three explores Beaumont's other pedagogical preoccupation, that

24 of forming qualified instructors.

Pedagogy is the most obvious constant in Beaumont's works, and she stresses that education must convey actual lessons to students if it is to serve them effectively. The fourth chapter below thus focuses on social concerns and civic responsibility, demonstrating Beaumont's modes and methods of communicating serious social and moral values, in guiding children, youth, and even adult readers toward social reform.

Social responsibility and the concept of what I am calling "change through action" figure prominently in Beaumont's texts, and this chapter shows that they must be seen as critical components in the overall significance of her work to both her contemporaries and to later generations of educators and social scientists. This desire to engage the reader in a dynamic process of change, both personal and public, separates her from many of her contemporaries, whose works may raise similar questions but do not provide practical responses.

The final chapter of this study also examines religion as an essential part of this transformational process envisioned by Beaumont- in terms of both individual behavior and the gradual transformation of society at large, most specifically in Magasin des pauvres, artisans, domestiques, et gens de la campagne (1768), Les Americaines (1770),

Contes moraux (1774), Nouveaux contes moraux (1776), and La Devotion eclairee

( 1781 ). This subject encompasses the development of what she considered to be honest and virtuous behavior, or a personal code of conduct that mandates individual responsibility. Explicit in her methodology for citizens' improved personal and interpersonal behavior had always been the role of religion and the definition of Christian behavior as codified by the . Such belief opposes her to the deist and

25 secular tendencies of so many or even most Enlightenment thinkers.

For her part, though she defends Catholicism and the faith it entails, Beaumont rejects the institutionalized eighteenth-century Church as arrogant and wasteful. As chapter four demonstrates, it is this passionate but not uncritical relationship with her faith and her church that Beaumont champions in all of her references to Catholicism.

The concluding remarks reaffirm Beaumont's alternative to women and men alike, appealing to an audience desirous of taking an active role in improving their condition and that of the communities in which they reside. Beaumont engages her audience with options for improvement that are more practical, more personal, and more achievable than the rather abstract theories of the philosophes and other intellectuals of her day. Her methodology allows for interpretation and implementation at every level of society and by each member willing to assume an active role in its well-being. The focus on royal behavior, while clearly essential as a tool for public acceptance of her proposals, is only one aspect of her lessons, in which each individual plays a distinctive role. Her personalized approach to moral philosophy represents a more tempered, middle ground.

The significance of Beaumont's works to Enlightenment discourse, and to the theoretical discourse that followed in European and American intellectual debate during the next century, should serve to stimulate more studies on this author and her role as a female moral philosopher helping to shape eighteenth-century thought.

1 Robert Darton lists several of her works in the library of Jean Ranson whose book orders and correspondence he traced. In fact, Darnton highlights "Ranson's favorite authors, notably Mme de Genlis and Mme Leprince de Beaumont" (Great Cat Massacre 219-20, 240). Jill Shefrin also refers to Beaumont's works as part of Queen Charlotte's library, sold in 1819 (Such Constant Affectionate Care 3), and Barbara

26 Kaltz cites such prominent international heads of state as Marie Antoinette of France and Duchess Augusta

Sophia of Hanover whose libraries included Beaumont's writings (Introduction, Contes et autres ecrits 25).

2 She began referring to herself as Mme de Beaumont during her fifteen years in London (see Artigas­

Menant, "Les Lumieres" 293), and is most often represented as such by European scholars. Although she is generally catalogued as Le Prince (or Leprince) de Beaumont, I use the shorter Beaumont to refer to her in this study, following the European direction and her own. For a more detailed discussion of women's names in the modern early period, see Joan DeJean's Introduction to her Tender Geographies, and Nancy

K. Miller's "Subject to Change."

3 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

4 The short story "Beauty and the Beast" is part of this work, as are the tales "Le Prince Cheri," "Belle et

Laidronette," and others.

27 Chapter 1

A Climate of Change

It must be confessed that the thought of the Age

of Enlightenment, more than that of any equally

important period in modern history, has been

studied from writings which express only one

side of the question.

RobertR. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in

Eighteenth-Century France

Although the number of women authors during the entire eighteenth century is typically listed as fewer than one hundred, and the counts given at mid-century hover around forty, 1 an increasing number of critics have begun to argue that women played a much more significant role than previously recognized in the development of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century in the decades before the French Revolution. Such claims are based on analyses of direct influence by these women's own works and their indirect influence on the writings of the men around them or at the least their abilities to secure positions of power for those men.

28 These last two arguments relating to women's influence through men have become common in feminist studies of the past twenty years, citing the deference women paid to their husbands/lovers on matters of authorship rights, the systematic assumption by male authors of the ideas expressed by the salonnieres they frequented, and the often noted practice of women obtaining favorable positions for their husbands/lovers/sons through seduction or charm. As Renee Winegarten reminds her readers, although women were effectively banned from participation in public matters, the men around them felt no remorse in using them to intercede for professional and political favors, or in borrowing their thoughts and words without acknowledgement when it suited them (9). This was the case for such well respected intellectuals as Emilie du Chatelet, whose personal intervention with the king and with the Academie Fran<;aise secured positions for her renowned lover Voltaire, and whose young male assistant claimed credit for her

Institutions de physique just before their publication (Zinsser, "Genius, Gender, and

Intellectual Authority" 182-3, 176). Yet du Chatelet herself was never admitted to the prestigious Academie des Sciences, did most of her work alone, and often even hid her work from Voltaire himself for fear of provoking his jealousy or damaging his ego. 2

Manon Phlipot, also known as Marie-Jeanne or Madame Roland and famed as the salonniere, collaborated heavily with her husband, yet never put her name to any of her thoughts or works until undertaking her famous memoirs from her prison cell while awaiting execution by the Revolution's leaders?

In fact, identity is at times an issue of confusion when it comes to the names of these aristocratic women. Known to history in the primary role of wife, the women often

29 used their maiden names in correspondence with family or friends,4 but historians and critics have systematically referred to them as Madame or Mademoiselle followed by the name of the husband. Thus we find Madame de Graffigny listed with Voltaire, and

Mademoiselle de Lespinasse alongside Diderot. What is the result of such subtle usage of titles? According to Joan DeJean, "in all Western traditions, great writers are known by a family name alone; dominant usage in French suggests that women writers are ladies first" (3). By the nineteenth century, women found one resolution to this dilemma in the adoption of authorial pseudonyms, as in the case of Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin,

Baronne Dudevant, known to readers as Georges Sand.

When women do express themselves directly, Susan Cahill reminds us, they often

"come to us not in their own words but through their interpreters and translators, whom we either know or presume to have been males" (xx). Only men had the extensive scholarly training coupled with individual status that allowed them to function as public commentators and literary critics. Their analyses during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often approached these women's writings with disinterest, and evaluated their works with a disdain or condescension that assumed an inferior ability rather than simply inferior training or preparation for such a role. Postmodern critical studies continue to be guilty of such glaring bias, a situation emphasized by Carole Pateman in 1989:

Strangely enough, in contemporary arguments ... feminist writers during

the Enlightenment are rarely discussed. Instead, one finds a litany of

authorities, Derrida, Lyotard, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Heidegger, Lacan,

etc., none of whom, as far as I know, display any interest in women

30 writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. No mention is made of

the fact that the early women writers cannot be fitted neatly into standard

categories such as "the Enlightenment," or that there were feminist critics

who did not share the assumptions held to characterize Enlightenment

philosophy. ("Conclusion" 374-5)

Pateman goes on to assert that women writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries promoted the process that twentieth-century feminists furthered, the process of questioning the long-standing system of patriarchy under which women found themselves bereft of personal power, rights, and other civic freedoms so readily enjoyed by men.

"Feminist writers before, during, and after the Enlightenment, challenged and criticized exclusion, attacked men's power, interrogated 'man' as a 'foundation' of political theories, took issue with an 'essentialist' view of women and their alleged natural deficiencies, and showed unequivocally how power was implicated in claims about rights, freedom, and reason (Pateman, "Conclusion" 375). An essential aspect of

Pateman's argument, which underlies much of this study, is that the Enlightenment canon of the various acceptable theories developed by the male philosophes should be expanded to include those developed by women, even when they oppose or question the dominant male trends.

Before turning to Beaumont's works, we should pause to consider the situation of women authors in eighteenth-century France and their presence in the Republic of

Letters, to clarify the context in which they were writing. The most obvious milieu is that

31 of the salon, a unique public and private forum that commanded serious attention in the burgeoning Republic of Letters.

Enlightenment Women and the Public Sphere: The Salon

The early modem period saw France engaged in a dynamic public discourse regarding the role of women in society. The publication of Poulain de laBarre's De l'Egalite des sexes (1673) refueled a remarkable and ongoing debate known as the

"Querelle des femmes," which had begun with the public trial in 1401-1402 led by

Christine de Pizan (1363-1434), Nicolas de Clamanges (1360-1437), and Gerson (1363-

1429) against Jean de Meun (?-1305) and his misogynistic representation of women in his books in the Roman de laRose (1270-1278),5 and had continued fitfully through the two centuries that followed. Centered on the capabilities of women, particularly their capacity for intelligent thought and reasoning beyond their emotional tendencies,

Christine de Pizan's Cite des dames (1405) follows this trial with detailed accounts of women from ancient myth and medieval history, designed to reinforce the case for women.

Within the first pages of the book, the three Ladies -Reason, Justice, and

6 Rectitude - exhort Christine, the young protagonist concerned about the dissemination of misogynistic texts, to refute the works that distort women's behavior, especially the

"Roman de laRose, qui jouit d'un plus grand credit en raison de l'autorite plus grande de son auteur" (Roman de la Rose, which benefits from greater credibility because of the broader authority of its author; 39). Her evocation of biblical models recognizes those women's indisputable achievements, for who could dismiss the Bible as a purveyor of

32 false or questionable information? Thus we find her description of Esther beginning and ending with the assurance of divine selection and the insistence on its recurrence: "Dieu choisit encore une femme, la noble et sage reine Esther, pour delivrer son people" (Once again God chose a woman, the noble and wise Queen Esther, to free his people; my emphasis, 171). Indeed, the book is replete with such examples of female leadership, often emphasizing women's abilities to perform all tasks at every level. Lady Reason describes Semiramis, the mythical conqueror-queen of Assyria, in those terms when she selects her as the first block in the foundation of their city: "Elle gouverna tous ces royaumes et terres selon les meilleures traditions de la chevalerie. Elle accomplit tant d'exploits remarquables en s'employant ainsi, qu'elle ne le cedait en rien aux hommes les plus forts et les plus illustres" (She ruled all these kingdoms and lands according to the finest traditions of chivalry. She realized so many remarkable feats that she conceded nothing to the strongest and most illustrious men; 69). The notions of authorial authority, of equality with men in abilities to reason and command, and of divine recognition for women's intelligence, are all stressed in this text by Pi zan. Each of these points will be important in the works of her successors, as Beaumont and other women demonstrate.

Although Pizan's historical precedent situates the beginning of the French debate in the fifteenth century, there is little indication of changing attitudes in society over the next three hundred years, or evidence of a more inclusive vision of women's roles by eighteenth-century society. In fact, in her preface to Samia Spencer's French Women and the Age of Enlightenment (1984 ), Germaine Bree focuses on the lack of progress that women had made in social equality and overall consideration. Bree sees the eighteenth-

33 century concept of feminism - between the religious classicism of the medieval, renaissance, and seventeenth century and the unfolding secularism of the Enlightenment

-little changed from Pizan's model:

In transition between the Christian version of 'woman' and the relativism

and pragmatism of a segment of eighteenth-century thought, feminism -

by female or male thinkers -is defined in simple, age-old terms: are

women as potentially capable of reasoning as men? Should their education

reflect their differing 'roles'? Feminism is defined in terms of a

recognition of woman as equal in status to man, man himself being the

model of mankind. (xv)

Yet if the foundational issues of the debate remained confined to these basic arguments, what can be seen to have shifted is the venue in which the debate was unfolding. In fact,

Carolyn Lougee sees a new dimension added to the "querelle" by the beginning of the seventeenth century in the form of the salon. Le Paradis des Femmes (1976), her study of the earliest French salons, delves into those gatherings that saw their formation in the seventeenth-century aristocratic institutions. Like Bree, Lougee recognizes the importance of a debate that concerns itself with the intellectual capacity of women in relation to the male standard, but adds that few public roles were available to women even if intellectual equality was accorded. Social tension surrounded the expanding presence of women in the public salons of that era, and feminism amounted to "nothing other than the positive response to the question whether women should play a public role in French society ... a shorthand expression for the defenses of women's participation in

34 salons" (7). Clearly women's intellectual abilities remained contested, but the focus of the debate centers on the acceptability of women as intellectuals to enter the public forum, with the salon serving as a critical point of entry.

The aristocratic and high bourgeois salons were clearly a venue that offered certain women access to more regular and semi-public intellectual debates than had been given to them in earlier French society. Period correspondence7 and novels,8 along with recent critical studies as discussed below, attest to the emergence of the salon in aristocratic circles under Louis XIV and even earlier. Fran~oise d' Aubigne (later to become Madame de Maintenon, second wife of Louis XIV), for example, presided over a literary salon with her first husband Paul Scarron, a well-known poet, dramatist, and novelist. This exposure to scholarly discourse within the protection of a private setting that gave women and men roles of equal importance undoubtedly influenced Mme de

Maintenon in her later interactions at the court at Versailles.

As such historians of the salon movement as DeJean, Lougee, and Dena Goodman have shown, the existence of salons can be tracked to a set of intersecting conditions first present in French society during the early 1600s. The growing had greater numbers and fewer responsibilities than ever. Gathered into the urban centers of Paris and

Versailles, these idle aristocrats searched for new ways to occupy themselves. Games of all kinds were the activity of choice, with gambling the most popular form of entertainment. Many seventeenth-century noblemen also saw the need for increased refinement in the manners of their fellow aristocrats, and deemed the salons an excellent setting for the practice of polite behavior and social graces. Jolanta Pekacz makes this

35 point in her chapter on "honnetete," examining the essays of several gentlemen who encouraged this apprenticeship they saw as necessary to acquiring the "art of pleasing"

(20-4), and DeJean refers to the "civilizing influence exercised by the Marquise de

Rambouillet's chambre bleue on the rough manners of the French court" (20). Of course, this behavior was considered a prerequisite for young girls and women, and so it was a given that they should take on the responsibility of ensuring a more civil male aristocracy. Critical to the physical survival of the medieval European household, the accepted custom centering family around the woman- Steven Kale refers to this as

"feudal traditions" in his historical study of nineteenth-century salons (12) -laid the groundwork for the concurrently public and private nature of the salon in which familial responsibilities were adapted to social settings where "nobles saw women's ability to civilize not merely as a feminine attribute but as a social and political responsibility which required noblewomen to perform the preeminently public task of guarding social conventions and maintaining the equilibrium, and consequently the advantages, of civilized life" (Kale 13). So it was generally acceptable for a seventeenth-century aristocratic woman to lead the salon with the goal of improving men's characters, although, according to Ian Maclean, certain groups - in particular the religious moralists

-disputed the mingling of the sexes for any reason (142).

What made those salons so important to the majority of men - and so tolerable - was the presence of women in a private-public meeting spot who could exert their influence over the noblemen, enticing them to take up the practices of good behavior classified under the inseparable terms "l'honnetete et la bienseance," where honesty and

36 polite behavior were representative of the generally desired comportment. Pekacz quotes from the Chevalier de Mere's Lettres (1689) to illustrate the importance of this social conditioning for members of the elite: "le plus difficile secret pour etre honnete homme depend de trouver le temperament le plus juste en toutes ses actions, et de se connaitre a la bienseance" (the hardest secret for becoming an upright man depends on developing the soundest temperament in all of his actions, and on his learning propriety; cited in

Pekacz 26).9 Thus these canonical descriptions of polite social actions, designed to hide the violent passions that medieval chivalry and Cartesian theory had deemed unacceptable in reasonable behavior, became the code for women to engage in free discourse with men so as to assist them in adopting "the discourse of polite society"

(Kale 18).

One of the unexpected outcomes of this ongoing development of controlled, polished comportment in idle aristocrats, high bourgeois, and intellectuals and artists of both classes was that such traditionally feminine characteristics would become too heavily adopted by men, who might then be scorned for being effeminate. This theme was the inspiration for several eighteenth-century texts, including L 'Annee merveilleuse

( 17 48), Abbe Coyer's satiric essay predicting a role reversal between the sexes. His focus was on the dangers of the feminization of men, a pattern that he argued would result in the decrease of their prowess as undesirable womanly characteristics were assumed.

Rousseau would also criticize such behavior and its potential for debilitating men in his

Lettre aD'Alembert (1758), warning that in the salon men focused on pleasing women or

"worse," to use Dena Goodman's reading, "they became effeminate, womanish" (54).

37 Such a swipe at fops on the margin of the salon movement reinforces the belief that traditionally feminine attributes were unsuitable for men, and the confirmation of the tenuous role allowed women, even in this locus of apparent influence and importance for them.

Pekacz is also insistent on the fine line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior for women, pointing out not only the disdain by men for too much femininity in their male colleagues, but also the social refusal to accept women who crossed the boundaries of behavior into "alternative modes of female conduct" to assume actions reserved for men. She argues, for example, that women's acts of adultery were tolerated by men whom she describes as having "vested interests in women's moral laxity" as an acceptable part of the social activities characterizing the seventeenth century, while the entry of women into such public and patriarchal domains as politics or science was ridiculed by both genders (73). Indeed, we find that seventeenth-century critics approved of Madame de Lafayette's psychological novel detailing polite behavior, romantic escapades, and moral fortitude, while Madeleine de Scudery's writings calling for the cultivation of reason and logic in women10 received no such acclaim. Both Lougee and

Pekacz comment on the success of the Marquise de Rambouillet' s salon, which Lougee attributes to the aristocratic standing of the salonniere herself (98-9), while Pekacz argues that it was also due to the "lighter and more entertaining tone" of the literary discourse in contrast with the more serious and academic ("savant") salon of the Vicomtesse d' Auchy, who shared many of the same guests as the marquise but received only criticism (82-3).

In fact, DeJean asserts that the acceptance of the marquise and her salon shaped the

38 structure of this venue from that point forward: "the structure that more than any other explains the social and intellectual freedom enjoyed under the ancient regime by both women of aristocratic birth and those, like Scudery, whose intellectual merits won for them a share of the privileges of aristocracy" (Tender Geographies 20-1). Yet this condition also confirms the general agreement across genders that women should respect the cultural roles assigned to them, and not take on the tasks of men. In fact, Pekacz suggests that the Marquise de Rambouillet wrote disparagingly of the writings of Scudery

(83), whom Lougee calls "the primary target of attacks on learned women by Moliere,

Boileau, and many lesser literary figures" (30). This is not surprising, in light of

Scudery's writing of the Femmes Illustres (1624) which, according to DeJean, "created the model for a confrontation between authors and critics that was reenacted in the early history of French women's writing whenever a formal breakthrough took place" (Tender

Geographies 32). Challenging the norms established for women, Scudery's writing was the object of rebuke by both men and women, categorized by her contemporaries and historians alike as "a mere bagatelle, the frivolous pastime of idle aristocrats" (Tender

Geographies 78). The seventeenth-century salon may have opened a more public space for women, giving them control of that semi-public environment and its content. Yet that space was nevertheless restrained by social conditions that maintained a political comfort zone for their male guests through the preservation of traditional forms of gendered behavior.

By the mid-eighteenth century the world of the salon had expanded into an important part of the Republic of Letters. As the integration of an upwardly mobile

39 was being felt in French society, the salon was experiencing that shift by providing access to many of its venues for intellectuals who were not necessarily of noble extraction. Although DeJean notes a transition of nobles using the salon to integrate bourgeois members to higher social rank beginning in the seventeenth century (Tender

Geographies 76), by the turn of the century, according to Goodman, the salon became an even more influential venue as the discourse of the Enlightenment began to pervade the social fabric of the capitol.

Enlightenment salons were working spaces, unlike other eighteenth­

century social gatherings, which took play as their model ... The

Enlightenment was not a game, and the salonnieres were not simply ladies

of leisure killing time. On the contrary, Enlightenment salonnieres were

precisely those women who fought the general malaise of the period by

taking up their metier. Like the philosophes who gathered in their homes,

the salonnieres were practical people who worked at tasks they considered

productive and useful. They took themselves, their salons, and their guests

very seriously. (Goodman 74)

Such a significant behavioral modification did not occur overnight, but was the result of increasingly independent discourse branching out from the oversight of the monarchy as the salons left the courts for the private residences of its salonnieres, allowing the introduction of a broader range of topics in a secular setting. Ongoing debates in the salons pertained to many social issues, including class, gender, education, and religion, and the differing philosophical orientations that dominated these exchanges are most

40 generally summed up as the dispute between the Ancients and the Modems, an "identity crisis" that DeJean defines as "the first literary controversy to reach a broad audience not otherwise concerned with academic affairs" ("Inventing the Fin de Siecle" 795, 794).

Expanding salon debates on current affairs and matters of growing social consciousness made them a venue that, according to Steven Kale, "reflected enlightened public opinion by facilitating the exchange of news and ideas and by permitting the philosophes to display themselves to 'the world"' (2). Historians agree in characterizing the mood of this period as one in which the concepts of knowledge and of progress at all levels of social development were held in the highest esteem.

This is not to say that, given the increasing attention to the female presence and its potential in society, French women were now able to interact with men on their own level, or find approval in public opinion for their non-traditional activities. The existence of only a handful of salons and salonnieres throughout the Enlightenment demonstrates clearly the limits that still existed in the development of women's public voices. In addition, we know that few women had the necessary educational desire, financial wherewithal, and social status to lead such powerful groups. As Elizabeth Macarthur notes, "women are constitutively, intentionally, radically excluded from public life"

("Between the Republic of Virtue and the Republic of Letters" 189). Yet women were entering the Enlightenment debate in other ways.

Several of the salonnieres were also authors of novels, essays, or extensive correspondence later published as collections. The letters of Marie-Jeanne Roland and

Julie Lespinasse were collected into published memoirs. Roland herself writes repeatedly

41 in her extensive correspondence of wishing to be a man so that she could write. Many historians document her collaboration on her husband's political texts while he was

Minister of the Interior and on his earlier Dictionnaire des manufactures, arts et metiers

(1780s). 11 Lespinasse is one of four eighteenth-century salonnieres whose correspondence is examined by Susan Dalton to demonstrate how these women break down barriers that separated private- traditionally feminine- domains and those public areas normally conceded as masculine. Dalton focuses not on the way that these women fit into societal norms, but rather on how they redefined those norms to create their own space and models, resulting in a new "personal agency" (11). Claudine de Tencin was a serious novelist, whose best known works are the Memoires du comte de Comminge

(1735) and Le Siege de Calais (1739). Fran<;oise de Graffigny and Louise d'Epinay, though not salonnieres in the precise sense of the word, were certainly part of that world and produced the now famous novels Lettres d'une peruvienne (1747) and Conversations d'Emilie (1774) respectively. Certainly the conversations of those intellectual gatherings, complemented by the interaction with male authors discussing their works, served as an impetus to these women to fulfill their own desire to write. As Goodman describes them,

"these salonnieres were not social climbers but intelligent, self-educated, and educating women who adopted and implemented the values of the Enlightenment Republic of

Letters and used them to reshape the salon to their own social, intellectual, and educational needs" (76). Obviously, their administration of the salons meant that they selected the guests to be invited to their gatherings, thus controlling to a great extent the topics and the texts that would be discussed. Many of these women cited the prominent

42 texts of the day in their own writings, as Alice Laborde points out in her biography of

Madeleine de Puisieux. Referring to the latter's association with Voltaire, Diderot,

Rousseau, and Condillac among other prominent Enlightenment thinkers, Laborde suggests that Puisieux experienced a sort of moral and philosophical apprenticeship equal to that of any philosophe of her day (39). The number of texts being discussed, reviewed, edited, and approved or rejected in the salons of Paris was impressive, we know.

Goodman's discussion on the subject details the reading of manuscripts that occurred at salons, primarily as an author's process of obtaining critical input from auditors and means for a text to "legimate itself first in this forum" prior to publication (147-8).

Enlightenment Women and the Public Sphere: Beyond the Salon

However, the salonnieres were not the only intellectual women who were writing.

Women from outside the salons also produced and published texts, several of them boasting repeat editions of their novels. Joan Hinde Stewart describes a restricted society of such literate women as Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, Adelaide de Souza, and Beaumont herself who wrote to support themselves financially, and almost always wrote "for the market" (Gynographs 4). Their themes remained traditionally feminine in appearance, most often including love, happiness, virtue, and marriage, with this last concept reflecting a particular importance for the eighteenth-century woman, subordinate to her husband by law and general masculine consensus. One important point is added to this idea of "female" themes with respect to their impact on society at large. As DeJean notes in her introductory discussion of the novel and its most common topics, "it is hard to imagine that any reader would have considered that the new narratives had implications

43 only for literature" (Tender Geographies 10). Whether the reader saw in such stories suggestions for change at a private or a public level, there was clearly something to be taken away from these fictional stories and recast in reality for the readers of everyday reality.

The majority of these women adopted the novel as their format of preference, finding in it a genre that was less scrutinized by the male reading population for its appeal to the masses and its generally mundane subject matter. As such, the novel appeared to incorporate an apparent incapacity for scholarly discourse that enabled women to espouse it without violating the social norms of propriety. Hilda Smith labels the works of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women intellectuals in France and England as

"circumscribed," existing outside of the traditional walls of the academies and institutions of higher education to which they were denied access. Thus, their texts addressed such subjects as religion, politics, the sciences, in only the most private and reflective terms. In fact, Smith adds that common opinion of that period concurred that "if women wished to write works of advice, they should be directed to other women ("Introduction" 3). It is perhaps this recommendation for women writers to orient their work to other women that allowed the female novelist to subsist in a realm historically identified as a bastion of male power and consensus. The majority of women's novels written during the eighteenth century do not appear to have incited the intense debate and controversy stirred up by their male counterparts, thanks primarily to a list of observed topics perceived as interesting only to a female audience, even if the underlying messages reached beyond the ostensible or surface themes. The extensive readership of so many

44 novels and short stories, documented in repeated editions and multiple translations, speaks at a minimum to their popular presence in the literary context of their day. And if, as Smith suggests, their topics were relegated to more personal, more intimate issues, these women authors managed to prove themselves through independent publishing successes12 and family affiliations13 as well as interaction in the Republic of Letters at large, thus possessing what Smith describes as "the abilities and sufficient contacts with leading male intellectuals for their works not be ignored" (104), and enabling them to write and have their works published, however discretely.

The writing itself was certainly not without merit, and was praised most explicitly by the circle of women responsible for its production. For example, Stewart points to comments by Madame de Lambert in her Reflexions nouvelles sur les femmes (1727), in which the latter speaks of "fine 'novels by ladies,' which had recently begun appearing"

(qtd in Stewart, 197). According to Lambert, unfavorable reaction to the texts was the result of the authors' gender rather than the quality of their writing. Stewart writes of

Lambert: "Literary pretensions, she claims, are considered admissible in men but unpardonable in women." Concurring with that conclusion, Stewart goes on to describe the eighteenth-century women's gems as "works that, by modern criteria, must be considered best-sellers" ("The Novelists" 197, 202), the eighteenth-century equivalent of our modern romance novel. Beaumont also speaks favorably of many of the texts published by such female contemporaries as Graffigny, whose play Clelie she finds so well written as to publish excerpts in her own Nouveau magasin Fran~ois.

45 Newspapers were yet another milieu of written communication and debate, occupying a critical position of influence during this period of the Enlightenment. Jack

Censer, in his excellent study on the journalistic press during the period preceding the

Revolution, identifies this burgeoning industry as one still "little integrated into the general interpretation of the Old Regime and the coming of the Revolution" (4 ), and thus essentially overlooked by researchers and analysts of literary developments during this important historical moment. He frames the period as one in which both sides of the political and social debates utilized the press to expose their positions, to reinforce their strongholds within sustaining groups, and to draw support from the French citizenry at large.

Once again, the journalistic field of newspapers and their contributors was dominated by men, although there were exceptions to this rule. In her recent study of

French women journalists, Suzan van Dijk adds much to our understanding of this small group of pioneering women. Documenting their work through letters, essays, and the newspapers themselves, she concludes that they were virtually left out of subsequent history first because they were so few in number, "des quantites negligeables" (5), and second, because they distanced themselves from the traditional image of the eighteenth­ century woman as prescribed by society. Lois Schwoerer similarly terms the actions of the women journalists and printers that she studies in eighteenth-century England, notably their using the printing press, "a public defiance of traditional norms" (57), specifically the social norm that places such public functions off-limits to women.

46 The most significant outsider is the Journal des Dames, a journal whose audience was intended to be women and whose discourse was most often directed at the defense of women. This publication, the first French journal or periodical to be edited and published by women, 14 was controversial from its inception. Nina Gelbart's study of the Journal des Dames follows the paper's changes in leadership, content, and political content during its thirty-year period of publication from 1759 to 1788. Although its earliest and its final editors were men, three editors who guided the journal through the mid­ eighteenth century were women who espoused varying degrees of political militancy. The subjects addressed by this journal are of particular interest given its purported audience­ women - and the controversial nature of their topics, which ranged from religious toleration to freemasonry, from rights for the poor to international peace, and from women's rights to family values. Gelbart traces the socio-political events within one publishing establishment and thereby tracks changes in the kinds of issues that the public wanted to hear about. "It implicitly endorsed the worth of its designated audience, and whatever it published was sanctioned as appropriate fare for female readers. Most important [... ] the Journal des Dames invited the active contribution and participation of its female readers" through its selection of materials, its ongoing calls for submissions, and its letters to the editor (Gelbart 292).

The journal began with a fairly aggressive feminine voice for France's eighteenth­ century women, in a journal whose purpose was to speak directly to those women themselves. Yet its second female editor chose a more restrained voice, in both content and commentaries, addressing not only intellectual women readers but also those who

47 were "less occupied with study" and interested in reading about "amusing novelties," thus presenting a softer side to the paper's readers and its critics (Gelbart 142), and certainly appealing to a larger readership. With this broader approach to journalism and to written communication in general, the newspaper opened itself to the female community of Parisian citizens who were increasingly becoming literate and socially conscious members of this predominantly bourgeois society. The role of the journal as a reflection of the culture of dissent is significant, allowing us to appreciate the many social issues that were included and omitted in the broadening debate of the Enlightenment.

Although the newspaper did not survive long enough to witness the first conflicts of the

Revolution, the dialogue that it had created with its readers constituted another and even more public forum for women to voice their unease and to validate their concerns.

One additional means of publication for eighteenth-century women authors was the collection of novels and novellas called the bibliotheque bleue, almost unknown today. The printers responsible for this catalog of titles apparently culled their inventory from older best sellers. Roger Chartier notes, for instance, that the 1723 novella Histoire de Jean de Calais, written by Madame de Gomez as part of a much longer two-volume novel, became part of the bibliotheque bleue when approved for reprinting in 1758. The objective of this collection and its printers appeared to be the broad redistribution of books from a more cultured level of circulation to the popular classes of readers (243-4 ).

For women authors, it appears to have offered a channel of republication of shorter works, more easily acquired and consumed by the growing category of middle-class women readers.

48 It is well known that the eighteenth century saw an expansion of the reading public. Because issues of popular significance were being debated not only in the salons but also in journals, pamphlets, novels, and other printed matter, the interest in reading intensified as well. As DeJean comments, "then as now, these debates brought new readers into the republic of letters" ("Inventing the Fin de Siecle" 798). If issues that affected the upwardly rising middle class were to be accessed in print, then reading had to become part of the rise of that significant group. Roger Chartier documents the increase in ownership of all categories of books in The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern

France ( 1987), pointing out the significance of these numbers from the middle class across the eighteenth century (189). Although inventories show that book ownership among the nobility reached approximately 78% in mid eighteenth-century France (192),

Chartier tracks book ownership statistics during that same period for the rising bourgeoisie as approaching those high percentages: around 58% of , 44% of doctors, and 34% of minor judicial office-holders owned books. Although only 16% of master merchants were book owners ( 196), Chartier adds that their membership in the growing number of Masonic lodges may have encouraged their reading without encouraging them to create personal libraries.

The growth in readership was stimulated by a parallel growth in authorship. One of the most complete inventories of those writing in this mid-century period was compiled by a systematic French government inspector of the book trade, Joseph d'Hemery. His work, documented centuries later by Robert Darnton, entails over 500 reports about written materials and those who composed them, outlining each author's

49 class, gender, domicile, and occupation (since most could not survive on their literary income alone). Darnton summarizes the lists succinctly: Writers "came from all sectors of society except the peasantry and from all corners of the kingdom except the backward areas of the south. They included a small number of women and a large number of bright young men" (9). There is no doubt, then, that the importance of writing as a means of communication was fully integrated in most levels of French society during this period.

In fact, though less numerous than their male counterparts, women were a wide­ ranging and significant audience. This explains much of the cultural and literary attention to matters touching them directly in the fiction of women writers, and is perhaps the most obvious reason for such authors as Beaumont to be preoccupied with issues affecting women, thus specifically targeting them in their texts.15

If reading among women was on the upswing in Enlightenment France and

England, there are certainly many cultural factors that played a part in that trend. First, the act of reading had become a more populist affair, no longer monopolized as in the medieval and renaissance periods by "the very few, the rich, and the " (Kramnick xi). Reading was actually encouraged for women. Even if all types of written material were not deemed suitable, lighter topics such as those found in the novel were considered acceptable by most authorities. In fact, the popularity of novels was such that several authors warned against the negative impact that these romantic stories could have on virtuous young girls. Rousseau's preface to Julie is by far the most well-known example of such a warning: "Jamais fille chaste n'a lu de romans" (A chaste young girl has never read novels; 72). Beaumont herself was adamant about the harmful influence that the

50 novels' heroines could inspire in young women, mentioning it repeatedly in her writings.

Such concern could only be the result of the increasing popularity of the genre within the reading population, but also signals the growth of that population itself.

Many historians also note that women governed three important European nations in the middle of the eighteenth century. Catherine the Great, a German often referred to in Voltairian terms as an enlightened despot, led Russia as empress from 1762 to 1796 following a bloodless coup to depose her unpopular husband Peter. Her connection with French culture and its Enlightenment gatekeepers 16 kept her in the forefront of journalistic news and salon conversation in Paris. Also in power during the second part of the century were Maria I of Portugal ( 1777 -1816) and Maria-Theresa of

Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary (1740-80). However, periodicals and newspapers appear to have treated these women rulers as genderless in matters of politics, calling them

Emperor or King and not Empress or Queen. Still, van Dijk notes that they were often portrayed as exhibiting qualities that could only be described as motherly, such as the oversight of immunizations for sick children or gifts of money to the poor ( 61 ), thus reinforcing from the top down those characteristics that were considered essential in the virtuous woman of the eighteenth century.

In addition to this presence of female royalty in the forefront of European current events, the presence of women at the basic levels of printed material distribution certainly expanded the acceptability of reading as an occupation for women in Paris and London.

Schwoerer notes the activities of English women as "distributors (that is, mercuries, hawkers, and criers), publishers, printers, bookbinders, and booksellers" (57). Margaret

51 Jacob refers to these same occupations in France of 1740, where arrest records include

'journalists, booksellers, and women hawkers" promoting libels and pamphlets on subjects ranging from religion and politics to pornography (96).

This expansion of the reading population to a more diverse market is also reflected in the popularity of Darnton's "small number of women," many of whom were accomplished novelists writing alongside their male counterparts. Darnton paints the literary world as essentially closed to women (a view that Goodman reproaches as a continuation of Rousseauist misogyny, 72), and he judges their contributions to it as ineffectual. "Women presided over the famous salons and therefore won a few places in the police files. But only sixteen of them ever published anything" (7 -8). Henri Coulet also provides some general statistics on the number of women writing in pre­

Revolutionary France, providing additional support to the findings of Darnton in his study. According to Coulet, approximately one-sixth of all novels published from 1751 to

1789 were written by women (vii). Yet these numbers most likely underestimate the actual number of women authors, whose work was often expressed through journals or, as discussed above, attributed to their male contemporaries. The impact of these women on the reading public of their period is only now beginning to be understood and appreciated.

The Missing Philosophes: Enlightenment Women in Print

Appreciating the climate under which educated women operated in the eighteenth century opens the door for a more detailed look at several of its most significant representatives, and provides a more complete framework for understanding Beaumont

52 and her achievements. Even though these women do not even appear in the vast majority of Enlightenment anthologies that appeared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 17 their writing exemplifies the spirit of their period in their reflections on the individual quest for knowledge, for happiness, for human cooperation, and for improved social conditions. Whether the topic was education, mathematics, and science, or marriage, friendship, and domestic harmony, these women were most certainly a part of the discourse that informed the eighteenth century.

Madeleine de Puisieux was one of the strongest voices of her century for the recognition of women as intellectuals and as agents of social change. Positioning herself in the dialogue of her day with her regular publications on a variety of topics, her impact on the arguments of her lover was recognized by the elite of Paris, and her very presence as a colleague of value among the philosophes and encyclopedistes of the

Enlightenment is recognized by historians and critics alike.

In fact, Puisieux' s writings reflect much of the ideology of Poulain de la Barre, a priest converted to Protestantism whose De l 'Egalite des deux sexes, discourse physique et moral, ou l'on voit !'importance de se defaire des prejuges (1673) was widely read in the late seventeenth century and beyond. Writing with an approach that Lougee calls

"social Cartesian" (19), Poulain wrote of the equality of men and women based on the distinct separation that Descartes theorized between body and mind, then he pushed the argument to include the anatomical body as well, an argument that Puisieux adopted in content and in form. Although such Enlightenment women as Puisieux admired Poulain' s writings and used his arguments in their own works, their own male contemporaries

53 ignored his work or, at best, discounted it like Montesquieu, whose Rica refers to Poulain as "un philosophe tres galant" (a very gallant philosopher) whose discourse on the equality of men and women is quite simply an "opinion extraordinaire" (Lettres Persanes

83, 84). Puisieux's use of this male predecessor resembles Beaumont's use of Fenelon's

Telemaque as a primary source for some of her basic pedagogical premises.

Alice Laborde's Diderot et Madame de Puisieux (1984) is the most thorough analysis of the life and work of this eighteenth-century woman author whose role in

Enlightenment thought was considerable, and yet remains largely overlooked. Laborde stresses the restrictions that de Puisieux placed on herself to comply with the social conventions of bienseance that governed women's behavior and, in fact, their perceptions of themselves in that patriarchal society. Most significant, however, is the analysis that this critic brings to the scholarly content of Puisieux' s written work and its place in

Enlightenment discourse. By placing Puisieux in the line of such philosophers and intellectuals as Montaigne and Diderot, Laborde focuses on the philosophical impact that a woman can have on her period. "Madame de Puisieux montre son role en tant que stimulant dans toute situation pedagogique et reste ainsi dans la ligne des conceptions avancees par La Rochefoucault et les moralistes du Grand Siecle" (Madame de Puisieux demonstrates her role as motivator in every pedagogical situation and thus remains in the stream of ideas advanced by La Rochefoucault and the moralists of the Great Century;

46). Laurence Vanoflen, who also writes specifically on Puisieux's novel L'Education du marquis de *** (1753), echoes Laborde's description of Puisieux as both conscious of the need for societal bienseance and rejecting the need for women to wallow in unhappiness.

54 Vanoflen suggests that Puisieux's text expresses not the resignation that emanates from such fictional predecessors as La Princesse de Cleves, but instead seeks to teach women to find their own solutions for happiness within the social context that they are given.

"Qu' elle sac he au mieux s' accommoder de son sort, se menager une autonomie et des ressources interieures, quitte a se retirer au couvent en demier recours" (Let her figure out how best to adapt to her situation, to create an autonomy and some inner resources, even if it means entering a convent as a last resort; Vanoflen 225). Such readings of

Puisieux's novel and others begin to address the notion that women's texts were often a locus of reflection that offered options to women, an approach that Beaumont used as well, adding another dimension to the feminist themes of the day.

Du Chatelet' s work on the scientific publications of Newton represents another example of this parallel world to which the femmes philosophes were consigned, for her brilliant scientific work gained the respect and trust of her fellow researchers even as she was forbidden membership in the academic circles open to men (Bodanis 125). In fact, as

Pekacz notes, it was du Chatelet's scholarly research that was the object of criticism and not her extra-marital affair with Voltaire (n.73). The two most significant books on du

Chatelet published to date are Elisabeth Badinter's Mme du Chatelet, Mme d'Epinay, ou l'ambitionfeminine au XVI//e siecle (2006)18 and Judith Zinsser's Emilie du Chatelet:

Daring Genius of the Enlightenment (2007). Zinsser, chronicling the life of Emilie du

Chatelet and her relationship with Voltaire, recognizes this woman as one of the century's greatest mathematical and scientific minds, whose most significant intellectual contribution was to translate, interpret, and expand upon Newton's Principia, and thereby

55 open the way to modem studies of energy and relativity. Badinter's scholarly analysis of du Chatelet and Madame d'Epinay, author of Les Conversations d'Emilie (1774), reveals the latter to be a noted pedagogue, companion of Friedrich Melchior Grimm, and close friend of Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau. Tracing the cultural factors impacting both women's lives, Badinter notes that both of these women shared the desire to exist outside women's traditional boundaries. Ambition is "une femme, qui refuse les limites assignees a son sexe et souhaite la meme liberte [que l'homme]" (a woman who refuses the limits imposed on her gender and desires the same freedom [as men]; 29). Zinsser also describes this Enlightenment scientist and mathematician's specialized work in her translations and interpretations of Mandeville and Newton. Referring to the works themselves, Zinsser details opinions of contemporaries as well as modem-day scientists, who agree that du Chatelet's gave new clarity to Newton's Principia. Yet

Zinsser also notes that du Chatelet lacked the feminist tendencies of such outspoken female contemporaries as Puisieux and Beaumont, preferring to focus on her work with an "apparent acceptance of disadvantages, the definition of a 'lesser' place in the eighteenth-century hierarchy of letters" ( 178), visible at least in her earliest works. Du

Chatelet herself reflects that by being excluded from the dominant intellectual circles of their male counterparts, women interested in writing could not allow themselves to produce "bad books" (qtd in Zinsser 180). One is reminded of the modem day expression that exhorts women in business to produce twice the quality and quantity of a man's work to be considered half as qualified.

56 As in education and pedagogy, socio-political reflection was also a domain of intellectual women, whose writings reflect a spirit of inquiry, intellectual productivity, and physical resolve that pushes beyond the restrictive barriers that society set upon them. Fran<;oise de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Peruvienne (1747) illustrates such interrogation by a woman author, adapting the technique of societal observation from a foreigner's perspective, as first popularized by Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721).

Research done to date on Graffigny and other femmes philosophes by such critics as Julia

Douwaithe, Elizabeth MacArthur, and Janet Altman, accentuates their differing perspective from that of the male intellectuals, and situates the parallel world that these women lived in and operated from. Recent scholarship provides a framework for the innovative solutions to the period's moral dilemmas that Beaumont and her female contemporaries often proposed in their writings. In fact, they often recognize their deviation from the norm in firmly presenting their own alternative. This is the case of

Graffigny's fictional Peruvian Zilia, who refuses to marry her French suitor Deterville, as might be expected in her situation, explaining instead "vous trouverez dans mon creur, dans mon amitie, dans mes sentiments tout ce qui peut vous dedommager de l'amour" (you will find in my heart, in my friendship, in my feelings all that will make up for love; 168).

Far from the world of the salon, Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni ( 1713-1792) spent her young and middle years on the stage of the Comedie Fran<;aise as what many critics called a mediocre actress. 19 Independent, though not independently wealthy as were many of her aristocratic counterparts, the income from Riccoboni's writing allowed her

57 to retire from the acting career that supported her into her forties (Gynographs 70). Her professional activities led to her associations with many of the great philosophes of her day, evidence that the Republic of Letters indeed opened the occasional door for the bourgeois woman of talent. Riccoboni's correspondence with English actor, playwright, theater manager, and producer David Garrick ( 1717 -79) is documented in a collection of his correspondence, The Private Correspondence of Garrick, With the Most Celebrated

Persons of his Time (1831-1832)?0 Barbara Mittman comments on Riccoboni's insight as a "thoughtful theoretician and proponent of realism in the theatre" (162). Yet Mittman also notes that Riccoboni did not frequent the world of the salon or of French society in general, and Mittman attributes that absence to a preference for her writing over the company of society (162). Stewart, however, is not so quick to explain her behavior as a disdain for worldly social gatherings, noting simply that Riccoboni's preference for aristocratic characters and settings in her novels contrasted with her own social status that limited her access to that social class (Gynographs 71).

Of particular note in Stewart's analysis ofRiccoboni and her work is the commentary about the autobiographical nature of her writings. Although most of her life was spent as a professional, among the working classes and theater people of Paris, critics historically wrote Riccoboni herself into her fictional aristocratic women. Such narrow reading of women's writing during the eighteenth century does nothing to further the study of this genre, according to Stewart, and in fact serves to "perpetuate a stereotypical vision of the woman writer" (Gynographs 71). Although it is certain that elements of her life are reflected in various novelistic themes, this in no different from the majority of

58 novelists of any era. More important to the reader in her period are the strong women that

Riccoboni's texts introduce, women who often admonish the men they encounter and exhort them to regard women in a more affirming manner. Her works, as Stewart describes them, embrace Beaumont's model in addressing women and creating a forum for them, "posing the question of the meaning of a woman's existence in a vigorous and remarkable new way" (77). Like Beaumont, Riccoboni emerges from recent scholarship as a strong independent woman creating decisive fictional women of courage and conviction.

While these French texts by French women were being published, similar trends were occurring in England. Although it is impossible to summarize the depth and breadth of the cross-channel literary developments and achievements, it is important to recognize their existence as part of the cultural environment that surrounded Beaumont during her years on British soil. A brief discussion of Sarah Fielding, one of eighteenth-century

England's most gifted and outspoken writers, will help to provide a perspective on this aspect of women's social, cultural, and intellectual status during the Enlightenment.

Fielding's life and writings correspond with Beaumont in timing, as they were both born in the early 1700s -Beaumont in 1711, Fielding in 1710- and began publishing their works mid-century. Fielding also turned to writing as a means of supporting herself, since her inheritance was insufficient to serve as a dowry that would attract a suitable husband.

Befriended by Samuel Richardson,21 who respected equally her and her more famous brother Henry (author of Torn Jones, 1749), Sarah wrote novels and critical studies, and translated from Greek into English. Her most popular works are now being

59 reprinted and are easily accessible to readers, yet her recent biographer and critic Linda

Bree posits that a true accounting of all her works may never be available due to the restrictions on the place of women in the eighteenth-century literary arena ("Preface" viii), where women often wrote under the names of their husbands, lovers, or simply created a male pseudonym for their authorial production.

The presence of such a sharp contrast in educational and professional opportunities between men and women was certainly not lost on Fielding, whose famous brother led a very different life. Betty Rizzo cites Fielding's definition of the word

"toadeater" as attributable to a humble companion subjected to objectionable behavior to please a patron or patroness (41 ). The "degrading demands" that Rizzo describes in

Fielding's work appear in relation to inequalities in marriage and in relationships within the aristocracy, most of which concern money or its absence. Yet Fielding also had a collaborative relationship with the satirist Jane Collier (1714-17 55), and together they produced important writings on tyranny and utopian communities that are beginning to attract critical attention. Still, much of the information available today about the life of

Sarah Fielding comes from research on Richardson and her brother Henry (Bree 1). Peter

Sabor, in his contribution to The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740-

1830, dedicates a chapter to "Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Sarah Fielding," yet refers to Sarah primarily as the mediator between the two men in the often hostile relationship, and only briefly concedes that she was a respectable author in her own right, publishing novels and even "an important critical treatise, Remarks on Clarissa (1749)" (139). Even in the section dedicated to Sarah, Sabor focuses on the input of Henry in her work,

60 followed by Richardson in an advisory role for both her writing and her publication.

Sabor essentially paints her in the shadow of the men, and argues that their primary interest in complimenting her work was to showcase their own literary prowess. Thus in both the eighteenth century and today, little critical commentary focuses on Sarah's literary or intellectual achievement of the period and its discourse.

The Modernist Viewpoint: Enlightenment Women and the Critics

By the middle of the nineteenth-century, such critics as Charles Saint-Beuve and the Goncourt brothers were looking back on the Enlightenment from a post­

Revolutionary perspective that generally romanticized the change in discourse spearheaded by the philosophes. Critics focused on the historical and cultural trends that they saw emerging in a society shifting from a monarchic dictatorship to a more democratic system. Understandably, given their own patriarchal social structure, the majority of these men - for they were, almost without exception, men -ignored the role of those eighteenth-century actors who were not an obvious part of the movement. Those players included the poor, the illiterate, and of course the women of every social class.

Thus even when women were integrated for a moment into the perspective of modern critics, the observers were male. The most prominent example is La Femme au

VX1/e siecle, the 1862 study by Jules and Edmond Goncourt that offered its masculine interpretation of the works of that century's women writers. In her lengthy preface to a reprint of this text, Elisabeth Badinter speaks of their "diatribe agressive" against all women in general, an attitude that she attributes to several factors, not the least of which is their disgust at the female body, at menses, procreation, prostitution, and other animal-

61 like functions (13-4). Obviously for the Goncourts there is no confusing this gender with one that lives by any sort of intellectual logic or reason. Yet after listing their novels, all heavily focused on nineteenth-century women in title and in subject,22 Badinter dissects their view of the eighteenth-century woman as one who prospered in a society of aristocrats and wealth, of social graces and virtuous behavior. "La femme du dix­ huitieme siecle, aux yeux des Goncourt, est urbaine, voire parisienne. Elle est riche, ou a tout le moins appartient aux classes aisees" (The eighteenth-century woman, in the eyes of the Goncourts, is urban, even Parisian. She is rich, or at a minimum is part of the leisured class; 22). Sylvain Menant paints a similar picture in summarizing their view of that century's woman as "animatrice et ornement d'une vie social raffinee" (social director and decoration of a refined social life; 7). It is not surprising, then, that the study produced by such misogynistic writers has also a dozen or so pages of mocking commentary on the working women, the , "la femme du people" (the populist woman) of that century, but devotes the rest of its four hundred pages to the beauty of the noblewoman, untouched and unaffected by the reality of life. Here are descriptions of courting and marriage, of fashion and style, of dancing and entertainment. There is, in addition, one chapter entitled "La Domination et !'intelligence de la femme" (Woman's dominance and intelligence) in which one would expect some mention of those

Enlightenment women intellectuals whose works had ostensibly added to the development of society, science, and philosophy during the eighteenth century. Instead the reader finds references to the famous mistresses of the century who influenced men's decisions at every social level through seduction and charm, and a unique sense of

62 observation, this feminine attribute being demonstrated solely through the letter writing of the century's elite women. They wrote nothing too profound, according to the

Goncourts: "Rien de trop ardu, rien de trop viril pour cette philosophie epistolaire de la femme: elle s' entretient avec sa raison personelle, son instinct naturel, de la peur du neant, de la craint de la mort" (Nothing too arduous, nothing to virile for this feminine epistolary philosophy: she discourses using her personal logic, her natural instinct about the fear of nothingness, the dread of death; 307). This adored woman is, it would appear, a catalytic object in the same manner as a beautiful painting or a well-designed building, whose objective is to make men happier, more productive, and more functional.

During this same period of the mid nineteenth century, the journalist and literary critic Charles Saint-Beuve was also studying the Enlightenment. A recent anthology of his essays written between 1824 and 1848 includes a volume on Les Lumieres et les salons (1992). Remarkably, of the sixteen biographical essays selected by the modern editors, five are on Enlightenment women. Salonnieres with the exception of Madame du

Chatelet, these women appear in striking contrast to the men both in their titles (none of the essays on men include their title or even their surnames) and in the content of the analyses. "Madame du Chatelet" is centered on her life with Voltaire, and cites her amorous dependence on him instead of her exemplary scientific work. Saint-Beuve writes in that essay, for example, that during a trip to Brussels Voltaire's concern is with philosophy and publishing his books, while du Chatelet is portrayed as "l'amie qui l'appelle et l'implore" (the lady friend who calls and begs him; 29). The essay ends with a discussion of Voltaire's actions after du Chatelet' s death, and mentions nothing of her

63 legacy to the Enlightenment or to the fields of science and mathematics. The "Voltaire" essay, on the other hand, is devoid of personal issues or sentimentality, and refers to du

Chatelet only briefly in a discussion of Voltaire's fascination with Newton and du

Chatelet' s superior ability with mathematical formulas (29-30, 171 ). Madame Geoffrin, whose salon he describes as the most complete and successful of all, is herself categorized as a superb organizer whose motherly traits allowed her to keep everyone and everything in order. According to Saint-Beuve, "la qualite dominante chez elle etait la justesse et le bon sens" (her dominant quality was fairness and good sense; 90), and he saw the most significant event of her life as a trip to Poland in 1766 at the invitation of

King Stanislas Poniatowski. Having assembled what Saint-Beuve himself calls the

"Encyclopedie du siecle en action et en conversation au tour d' elle" (Encyclopedia of the century in action and conversation around her; 86), Madame Geoffrin is nevertheless little more than a superlative administrator of people and goods. Saint-Beuve has successfully portrayed Enlightenment women as assisting men in finding their way at best, and as emotional and high strung in general.

In Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), Cassirer explains the systematization of thought that he attributes to this movement as those "fundamental intellectual forces ..

. [that] can be grasped only in action and in the constantly evolving process of thought"

(ix). Such analysis of the large pieces of the century's shifting intellectual priorities risks overly simplistic generalizations, and Voltaire's complex views on religion, for example, are packaged as part of "the great process of secularization of thought, in which the

Enlightenment sees its main task" (Cassirer 97). Raymond Williams contests just such a

64 generalized historical view of the period in Marxism and Literature ( 1977) when he addresses the notion of social thought and hegemony. Williams correctly argues that, although social, cultural, and political trends may dominate an historical period, to ignore the ancillary discourse is to ignore the alternate or confrontational voices that also existed within that society and helped to form it. "It [hegemony] does not just passively exist as a form of dominance. It has to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also continuously resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own" (1279).

Similarly, Dena Goodman gives Cassirer credit as a critic who "did more than anyone else to make the Enlightenment the subject of serious scholarship" (Republic of Letters

63), but she is quick to specify that his removal of the discourse from its social context left an "Enlightenment" devoid of women intellectuals and overlooked the essential role of the salon, and of women in general in its development (66). Certainly Cassirer's examination of knowledge and the process of thought itself helped explain the philosophe, leaving the rest of the Republic of Letters beneath his scope. In addition, his broad strokes encompassed only the most obvious of sources, devoting much discussion to Voltaire and Newton, for example, and mentioning du Chatelet only as the recipient of

Voltaire's first draft of the Essay on Manners (216). The reader readily assumes from the text that it is Voltaire whose work ultimately brought clarity to the relationship of historical knowledge and natural science as part of his investigation of the "progress of civilization and the inner relationship of its various elements," and that du Chatelet was at best his muse. She is nowhere in the chapter on "Nature and Natural Science" in the same

65 way that none of her contemporaries appear in the chapters on religion, history, laws, or even aesthetics.

By contrast, Darnton proceeds like an Annaliste historian opposing such broad abstractions and lofty ideals, examining the intellectual community of Paris through the eyes (and notes) of its more abundant inhabitants: the libellistes, the booksellers and their clients, and even a police inspector. His characterizations of that period present more nuanced alternatives to the expansive categorizations by Cassirer or many of the other twentieth-century critics whose studies proposed a dominant discourse espoused unambiguously by all members of the Republic of Letters. Yet as Goodman has charged,

Darnton is still caught in the masculine viewpoint on this world of information that he reflects in his studies. Thus he could he write of one of his protagonists, a private individual and enthusiastic reader: "Ranson's favorite authors [were] notably Mme de

Genlis and Mme Le Prince de Beaumont" (240), while devoting the majority of the essay to a study of Rousseau and never again mentioning these two women authors.

Two other iconoclastic critical texts of the early modem period are Paul

Benichou's Morales du grand siecle (1948) and the study by Rene Pomeau in collaboration with Jean Ehrard, Histoire de la literature fram;aise de Fenelon a Voltaire

(1984 ). In each case, the author gives a literary and historical overview of the period - the seventeenth century for Benichou, and the mid-seventeenth to late eighteenth century for

Pomeau and Ehrard - with the introduction of authors, texts, and literary trends reflecting cultural transitions within French society. Yet in both cases there is no mention of women authors, of the place of women in this developing climate of thought and action. The texts

66 produced by Mme de Lafayette, Fran<;oise de Graffigny, and Emilie du Chatelet do not appear as even a minor point of interest. Du Chatelet appears in one paragraph only, inserted into the chapter on Voltaire. Described as "ardente, ayant le gout des idees et des sciences," (zealous, interested in thought and science; 367-8) her main attribute is her fifteen-year relationship with the philosophe. A two-page discussion by Pomeau and

Ehrard of the "nouveaux precieux" is centered on the texts of Bouhours, Desfontaines,

Fontenelle, and La Chaussee, yet nowhere is there mention of Scudery or Lafayette.

Benichou does no better, concentrating on the century's trends through the writings of

Corneille, Moliere, and Racine, with no apparent interest in the women whose lives were so often portrayed by his authors.

As Germaine Bree stated (in comments cited at the beginning of this chapter), a study of the eighteenth century without a study of its women is shallow and incomplete.

Carole Pateman has firmly established the need to define feminism in eighteenth-century terms by situating the patriarchal order of all society as the defining mode of that era's perspective on the question of women's roles. Like Goodman, DeJean, Lougee, and

Pekacz, Pateman stresses that the eighteenth-century focus on reason as a male characteristic allowed them to "sublimate their passions," whereas women were seen as unable to "transcend their bodily natures and sexual passions" (4), judged incapable of reasonable actions and thus unsuitable for the public roles reserved for men. This logic explains how philosophes and critics defined the salonnieres' limited roles as hostesses, and summarizes the foundation of Rousseau's description of Sophie's existence complementary to that of Emile. What Pateman and many other modern feminist

67 theorists argue today goes beyond Germaine Bree's basic suggestion to uncover women's history in the Enlightenment and add it back into that period's studies. Instead they challenge the very notion of patriarchal authority as the basis on which those studies are centered and analysis begins. These critics argue for a more careful analysis of expressions of equality as they appear in the works of eighteenth-century women writers, understanding them as confrontational in their engagement of public, patriarchal topics even when such discourse occurs through the traditionally private topics relegated to women. It is even more important to highlight the rare instances when demands for equality are surpassed and Bree' s very notion of "man himself being the model of mankind" is challenged. These are the kinds of questions that modem scholars are raising with studies of Graffigny's heroine who rejects love for a life of study and friendship, and that can be used to interpret Beaumont's Marquise de*** who, in the final pages ofthe

Lettres de Madame du Montier rejects her suitor for a life of community service in the

Savoyard countryside.

Pateman adds that it is often in the forgotten works of eighteenth-century women that one finds the first debates with such inscribed theorists as Descartes (whom du

Chatelet abandoned for Leibnitz), Locke (whom Mary Astell measured against

Descartes), and Rousseau (a favorite of Wollstonecraft, who was also one of his most severe critics) (366). As Pateman says, several women writers of the eighteenth century must be judged as significant not only when their works supported the philosophes who were introducing ideas now viewed as the core of Enlightenment theory; those who

68 opposed the discourse being championed by those philosophes and non-French thinkers must also be evaluated for the impact of their arguments ("Conclusion" 367 -8).

Unlike the descriptions by such critics as Cassirer or Sainte-Beuve that paint salonnieres as merely decorative and inspirational, Dena Goodman documents their influential role in the advancement of Enlightenment ideals among members of the

Republic of Letters. Citing a trend among modern male critics to move the Enlightenment from the salons and the superficiality that they claim women brought to these gatherings,23 Goodman concedes that members ofthe Republic itself often envisioned these clever females as leaders of the salons, hostesses subjecting their guests to the strict rules of "bienseance" so as to inspire the men with feminine qualities that promote tempered, interactive social behavior. Goodman points out that Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Buffon, for example, describe women's gentleness in manner, a quality that allows them to guide men from a naturally bellicose state to one of civility. In fact, Montesquieu describes women as unsuitable for being heads of households, something that is "contre la raison et contre la nature" because of their weakness, yet goes on to call them apt for governing because "leur faiblesse meme leur donne plus de douceur et de moderation; ce qui peut faire un bon gouvernement, plutot que les vertues dures et feroces" (their very weakness gives them more softness and moderation, which can make for good government, rather than hard and fierce virtues; De l 'Esprit des lois 1: 255). Thus many modern critics see themselves justified in their conclusion that "women's role in history was to pacify men" (Republic of Letters 7).

69 Yet Goodman's argument is rooted in her valuation of the salon as an overlooked and oversimplified access point to the public sphere for intellectual women. The salons were used to promote the ideals of the Enlightenment and women's place in it. "The initial and primary purpose of the Enlightenment salons was to satisfy the self-determined educational needs of the women who started them" (Republic of Letters 77). The importance of that self-determination demonstrates, she argues, that even if women's writings were not apparent in the Enlightenment and its legacy, the influence of these women on the development of its discourse was essential to its ability to even exist, let alone flourish as it did.

Suzan van Dijk expresses some concern with such emphasis on the role of women as a group. She sees in such arguments as Goodman's a potential for more stereotyping of women, and posits that studies prioritizing the "feminine nature" of women as a group often focus on the "forgotten heroines" and "les muettes de l'histoire" (the silent women of history; 3), leaving the role of the "ordinary woman" and her place in society to be overlooked. Van Dijk, in her study of French women journalists, focuses on specific women whose lives were not of such historical prominence as to demand entry into the most records of state. Their desires, their actions, and their work united to demonstrate an alternative for women based on the conjunction of social demands and personal commitment. Hers is, perhaps, more reflective of the way in which the majority of

Enlightenment women operated, edging into a slightly more public sphere of influence as social conditions allowed and awareness intervened.

70 In Gynographs, Stewart too goes beyond the prominence of the salon in her analysis of Enlightenment women authors, repeatedly touching on that same notion of feminine empowerment that Goodman situates in the salon yet discerning it embedded in their writings. The women of her study are clearly thoughtful and critical participants in formulating and articulating the ideologies of their social environment, similar in that sense to the salonnieres that Goodman presents. What Stewart unwraps are the private concerns that most directly touched these women's daily lives- marriage, children, education, religion, and family. As with the salonnieres, however, it is the social fabric so intricately tied to the lives of these women and their roles in the network of players and responsibilities that conditions their words, and that formulates their choices. Rather than glossing over the nuances of individuality as we find with Cassirer, it is those very nuances that Stewart emphasizes, noting their importance in the lives of women. Delving into their own writings, not the annals or notebooks of record keepers, is where Stewart explores the impact of the Enlightenment on women, and finds indications of their influence on it.

Sophie Raynard also expands her view of early modern women outside the salon.

In her study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fairy tales, Raynard focuses on the fairy tale, another significant format for seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century women writers. Pointing out the predominantly feminine authorship of works in this genre and that of the novel, Raynard posits that a modification in the direction of our research should occur, resituating dominant strategies as being advanced by women rather than men. If one recognizes the importance of this arg.ument, as I believe one

71 should, the links between these women, their works, and the men whose writings they helped to shape cannot be overlooked. What Raynard suggests is a shift in the structure of analysis, the creation of a new locus of origin similar to that suggested by Pateman, which takes the standard away from a male-dominated center and resituates it in a female core of influence. "ll s' agit done de remettre en question la direction de 1' influence exerce entre auteurs pour restituer aces femmes ecrivains la part qui leur est due" (We must therefore question the direction of influence exercised by authors so that these women authors can be given back what they are owed; 98). Moving beyond the simple question of whether women were inspired by the conversation, the ideas, the influence of the men around them, Raynaud takes the position that it is men who profited from women's innovation in the writing of the novel and the fairy tale, and those men who later used those genres certainly owed a debt of gratitude to the female sources.

Unlike novels and fairy tales, women's presence in the field of journalism as documented above provided a distinct break with tradition, placing women in a male­ dominated arena from beginning to end, from the private act of writing to the very public act of production and distribution. Gelbart's descriptions of these women confirm the unusual attitudes that supported their ambitions, operating in what was obviously a male­ dominated profession. Gelbart describes the women who ran the Journal des dames in clear terms: "[a]ll three wanted power, more power than could be achieved by the publication of isolated books. Journalists were far less solitary than novelists, for they had a dialogue, an exchange, with their audience" (93). This position is reinforced by other modern critics who see in the adoption of this profession a conscious decision to

72 move outside the realm of accepted female behavior. By functioning in this way, critics also find that the women journalists received negative reactions to their actions, their very presence in this field, both in their day and beyond. "Cela a du rendre inevitables certaines reactions, manifestees par les journalistes contemporains les premiers, mais souvent reprises par les historiens. Le reflexe le plus simple etait la negation; d'autres commentateurs ont pu etre moins direct, tout en opposant un refus semblable a ce qui choquait leurs habitudes" (That made certain reactions inevitable, as demonstrated first by the contemporary journalists, but often repeated by historians. The simple response was negation; other commentators were less direct while still similarly rejecting that which shocked their traditions; Van Dijk 5).

Not all women- even those whose activities classified them as well-educated or even intellectual- battled for equal standing in Enlightenment society. Much of the actual comportment of women in the second half of the eighteenth-century is seen by

Rene Winegarten as the direct influence of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Noting that he cast a sort of spell on his female public, Winegarten traces this attraction to Rousseau's elevation of his own almost feminine emotions: "his remarkable gift for self-justification, his concern with his own identity, authenticity, and selfhood" (12). The apparent interest in women, joined with his relegation of them to positions of subservience, projects a perspective of women that Mary Seidman Trouille calls "complex and contradictory, full of ambivalence and discontinuities" (1). Yet Rousseau was able to generate a strong female following in spite of his allocating them to the domestic roles of tending house, caring for children, or catering to their men. This is seen by many modern critics as the

73 reason that scores of late eighteenth-century women refrained from any involvement in affairs that were considered the domain of men. Extremely adamant about this negative role played by Rousseau, for example, Winegarten insists that his denigration of women writers as asserted most particularly through his arguments in Emile is the source of public conviction in the necessary presence of a man behind any woman author, a prejudice that continues well into the nineteenth century (17). Trouille's study, a broader, more tempered view of Rousseau's reception, again demonstrates his impact on women writers and their approach to women's place in public activities. As she points out, "even women who openly criticized Rousseau recognized his eloquence and powers of persuasion over others" (5). Thus, what all of his readers and critics seemed to recognize first and foremost was not the originality of his message, but his ability to communicate it on a much wider scale than any of his predecessors, particularly Locke on whose work so much of Rousseau's pedagogical writings are based.

Yet even as feminist perspectives continue to be demonstrated as relative and necessary in studying the social and historical development of pre-Revolutionary France, such recent studies as Leigh Ann Whaley's Radicals: Politics and Republicanism in the

French Revolution (2000) continue to exclude women almost completely from any list of important figures or movements of this period. For example, in the chapter "An

Introduction to the Men of 1792" (my emphasis), only two women find a place within her group of revolutionaries: Charlotte Corday for her role as assassin of the revolutionary activist and journalist Jean-Paul Marat, and Madame Roland, whose role as hostess is the

74 only relevance Whaley attributes to her part in political debates alongside such radicals as

Brissot and Robespierre (24).

Perhaps one of the most telling comments on the critical study of the eighteenth century comes from one of its most ardent supporters and innovators. In her introduction to Samia Spencer's anthology, Elisabeth Fox-Genovese refers to the salonnieres and the aristocratic women of the Enlightenment in general as examples of subjects that have begun to occupy and preoccupy modern critical discourse. She concludes, "feminist scholars in particular and scholars who study women in general have yet to reach agreement about the proper framework for the study of women" (3). With so many works still to be brought out of the archives, and so much misinformation regarding women's activities to be debunked, it seems particularly irrelevant to focus on a proper framework for any study at all. Instead, more scholarly work should be added to the debate so that the diversity of the Enlightenment women and their circles of influence, of subjugation, or of complete rejection of the social conditions of their times can be fully appreciated.

Raymond Williams' argument regarding the acceptance of emergent tendencies by dominant groups in any culture sheds light on the ongoing debate regarding the existence of women's texts in the eighteenth century, their importance to readers in that society, and their present-day oblivion from the majority of studies on Enlightenment thought and its development. 24 His statement categorizing excluded practices as "the personal or the private, or as the natural or even the metaphysical" (1285), is an interesting link to this public-private debate that has so conditioned women's studies of the eighteenth century and defined their relegation to a non-inclusive area of literary and historical study.

75 1 For example, Robert Darnton shows that the police inspector d'Hemery tracked 434 active writers in the

France of 1750, including only sixteen women (150). Suzan van Dijk cites studies by several twentieth­ century critics, all of whom put the number of eighteenth-century French women novelists between 10% and 15% of total authors (227), and Renee Winegarten uses Raymond Trousson' s number of "at least forty who published fiction between 1735 and Rousseau's death in 1780" (16).

2 Several critics include mentions of this situation with du Chatelet and Voltaire. In particular, Judith

Zinsser, Elizabeth Badinter, and David Boganis give excellent accounts of Emilie's work done at nights in the seclusion of her country home at Cirey so that Voltaire would not know that they were both working on projects for the Academy of Sciences competition in 1738.

3 Brigitte Szymanek's article "French Women's Revolutionary Writings" (1996) explores Mme Roland's letters and memoirs to clarify why she would, in fact, allow her thoughts and ideas to be used without taking credit for them in the final texts. Mme Roland writes, for example, "Ce sera done sous le nom d'autrui, car je me mangerais les doights avant de me faire auteur" (Then it will be under someone else's name, for I would rather chew off my fingers than become a writer; Memoires 321, cited in Symanek 103).

4 Joan DeJean provides a lengthy discussion of the practices of early modern women regarding their names in her introduction to Tender Geographies (1991).

5 Armand Strubel's introduction to Le Roman de Ia Rose provides useful commentary on this trial, as does

Carolyn Lougee (41-46). See also articles by Marcella Munson and Joan Kelly.

6 This is their most common form in English. The original French names are Raison, Justice, and Droiture.

7 For the seventeenth century, see for example the posthumously published Lettres ( 1725) of Madame de

Sevigne (1626-96) and Correspondance generate (1752) of Madame de Maintenon (1635-1719), and

Conversations sur divers sujets (1680) by Madeleine de Scudery (1607-1701). Manon Phlipon's letters and memoirs, covering the years 1767 to 1793, provide a detailed look at her Enlightenment salon, as do the collected letters of Julie de Lespinasse. Both of these women's letters are the subject of Susan Dalton's detailed study Engendering the Republic of Letters (2003).

76 8 In the seventeenth century, La Princesse de Cleves (1678) is the most obvious fictional text detailing court gatherings where ideas and ideologies were exchanged. However, non-fictional works by Fran<;ois

Poulain laBarre and Michel de Pure, for example, spoke directly of the salons and the role of women in them. Voltaire's Le Siecle de Louis XIV (1751) is an example of this type of discussion inserted into an eighteenth-century text.

9 See also Ian Maclean's Woman Triumphant (1977) for a detailed description of "honnete," "bienseance," and other related terms as found in predominantly male-authored period texts (123-135).

10 One of the most famous salonnieres of the second half of the seventeenth century, Scudery also wrote several lengthy novels, such as Ibrahim ou l'illustre Bassa (1641), Artamene ou le grand Cyrus (1648-53), and C!elie (1654-61), in which the now famous "Carte du Tendre" first appeared.

11 In addition to Macarthur, Mary Trouille's Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read

Rousseau (1997) provides a thorough discussion of the work that Roland did for male authors under their names.

12 Smith notes the affiliation of John Norris with Mary Astell following her acclaimed publication A

Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1692-1697).

13 Sarah Fielding's fraternal link to Henry is the most obvious example of this type of family connection.

14 Although Beaumont's journal, Le Nouveau magasin Franr;ois, was a French-language publication appearing first in 1750, it was published in England and therefore not considered to precede the Journal des

Dames. Beaumont's journal is discussed at length in Chapter 2.

15 Chapter 3 of this study provides more detail on the state of women readers in France and England during the mid-eighteenth century. Beaumont's interest in women as an audience is addressed throughout this study, but most specifically in Chapter 2.

16 Catherine's education was ensured by French tutors in her youth. As an adult, she corresponded with such philosophes as Voltaire and Diderot, and was patron to a significant number of writers including

Beaumont in her later years.

77 17 See, for example, Precis de Ia Litterature fran~aise du XVIIe siecle (1990) by Robert Mauzi and Sylvain

Menant, which does not include one woman author, the Dictionnaire europeen des Lumieres (1997) by

Michel Delon, which does not include Graffigny, du Chatelet, Beaumont, or other recognized women

authors.

18 This book was originally published in 1983 under the title Emilie, Emilie, l'ambitionfeminine au XVIIIe

siecle.

19 In her article on Riccoboni, Ruth Thomas notes Diderot's use of Riccoboni in his Paradoxe sur le

comedien (1773) to illustrate that "sensitive people are unsuccessful actors since they cannot distance

themselves from their art" (Thomas 358).

20 Riccoboni's letter is cited in Pekacz (181).

21 Richardson, author of many novels including the bestseller Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), assisted

Sarah Fielding with editing and publishing efforts, according to Rebecca Garwood's autobiographical

sketch (chawtonhouse.org/library /biographies/tiel ding.html).

22 The brothers' most well-known works include Renee Maupertin (1864), Germinie Lacerteux (1865),

Manette Salomon (1865), and La Fille Elisa (1865), all with female protagonists from the lower or bourgeois class of Parisian women. These women are portrayed as prostitutes, artists' models, actresses,

and other low-level roles.

23 Goodman refers specifically to Darnton, Peter Gay, Daniel Roche, and Roger Chartier as utilizing this method of analysis.

24 "No dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention ... it is a fact about the modes of domination, that they select from and consequently exclude the full range of human practice" (1285).

78 Chapter 2

The Feminine Voice

Women authors are granted authoritative status

only when they can be considered exceptional,

beyond their sex, and when they can be

integrated into educational programs and reading

lists without disturbing the traditional literary

landscape.

Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies

During the six-year period of 1748 to 1754, Beaumont entered an extremely prolific and public phase of her life. It was in 1748 that she first became a published author, and by the time Civan appeared in 1754 she had written two two-volume novels

(Le Triomphe de la verite of 1748 and Civan of 1754), a two-volume collection of essays

(Lettres diverses et critiques of 1750), and a four-volume pedagogical handbook

(Education complete in 1753). Further, she also edited thirty monthly anthologies that included literary, scientific, and historical fiction and non-fiction as well as her own essays, commentaries, and epistolary stories. This staggering written production was

79 accomplished around her 1748 relocation to London and the establishment of her

teaching enterprise and her short-lived school for governesses.

These earliest texts help situate Beaumont's women (including the author herself)

as part of eighteenth-century discourse, responding to it and in many ways helping to

shape it. Through the portrayals of women in these writings, the common characteristics

that dominate the early feminist voice of her work emerges, as do some of the more

paradoxical ideas expressed in much of her introductory material and in her fictional

characters.

Because most of her writings contain lengthy dedications and introductions

expressing the author's positions on society, general social conditions, certain

individuals, and her own position in relation to all these subjects, they provide direct

insight into Beaumont's personal beliefs and their effects in her work. They are also

significant as a reflection of her perspective on the dominant social standards of the

period under which she was expected to operate. Delving into these paratextual sections

allows for a critical review of Beaumont's priorities regarding women's issues, including both her reactions to society's response to her positions and the development of public

sentiment toward women's issues. Reacting to European patriarchal imperatives and the notions of bienseance evoked in chapter 1, Beaumont became a model and a mentor in her own right, encouraging her female readers first, to find pride in their womanhood

and, second, to support one another accordingly. These two themes, which Beaumont repeated throughout her oeuvre, form the foundation of her own authorial power as they establish female criteria for authority.

80 Achieving authorial authority

Beaumont spent ten years (1725-35) in a Norman convent school for young women, where she received her own education, then spent several years teaching. This educational process will be detailed more extensively in the next chapters, when her concepts of education, religion, and social consciousness are explored. What matters is that Beaumont, as the beneficiary of an extended education, most certainly recognized her unusual situation as an educated woman in eighteenth-century France. The loss of her mother in early adolescence affected her emotionally, and she wrote about the impact that her mother's early example and training had on her development as a person. Following that traumatic event, it was not her father who saw to her intellectual and emotional well­ being, but rather the two women who brought her and her sister to the convent school and saw to her instruction. Beaumont refers to them in several of her works, particularly in her introduction to the Education complete, recognizing the enormous role that their guidance and concern for these young girls played. Situating these "deux

Dames du premier merite ... ala tete d'une Academie, ou l'on formait des maitresses d'ecoles" (two Ladies of the highest merit at the head of an Academy where school mistresses were trained; 7), Beaumont infers not only their mentorship to the young girls in the school but also their position as leaders, as women of action using their social positions and personal intellect to contribute to the improvement of society through the education of its children and the training of its future teachers.

This model of the student mentored by a woman of experience and exemplary behavior would become a staple of her pedagogical methodology, one that she stresses in

81 her works and also exemplified herself through her writings and her teachings during the

productive years of her life. This model figure is significantly more than just a part of her

approach to education. Her early writings demonstrate its obvious effectiveness as a

learning practice when incorporated into her pedagogical system, and indeed this model

(in male form) is as old as Greek antiquity. Beaumont also insists, however, on mentoring

as a sociological technique available to women who wish to help other women lower the cultural and intellectual barriers imposed on their gender. She demonstrated that in this way women can achieve their fullest potential, despite the negative societal classification that their gender comports. In assuming the traditional male model of auctoritas - that is, the psychological power to command, influence, or dominate behavior- she then invites her female readers to imitate her. Beaumont's concept of female mentoring thus takes on fresh implications by relocating the source of precedence and critical thought. If her approach appears to mimic the patriarchal model, it nonetheless challenges the

stereotypical male characteristics deemed the only ones suitable for roles of authoritarian leadership. Clearly understanding what Carole Pateman calls "the classic contract theorists [and their argument] that natural freedom and equality were the birthright of one sex" (5), Beaumont continually demonstrates that such an assumption is inherently false and ultimately dangerous for the well-being of society.

When she left the convent school at Ernemont, Beaumont left behind the all­ female environment where her initial concepts of mentoring had taken shape. Yet her years in the court at Luneville brought her into contact with the reputations, if not the actual persons of such female Enlightenment intellectuals as Emilie du Chatelet and

82 Fran~oise de Graffigny, whose highly acclaimed works appeared in print in the years

immediately preceding Beaumont's first publications. In fact, Beaumont's personal or

professional association with Graffigny is apparent from the appearance of Graffigny's

play Cenie (1751) in Beaumont's Nouveau magasinfranfais in the volume for February

1751. The texts of such predecessors as Christine de Pizan, Mesdames de La Fayette, de

Sevigne, and de Tencin may also have been part of Beaumont's library, providing that example of mentoring and encouraging her in the promotion of her own works. Yet the

paucity of published work by women authors could not have escaped her, and, as we saw in chapter 1, the obvious misogyny of many mid-century texts was obviously pervasive and certainly attracted her attention.

How then did Beaumont come to believe that she could advance her own ideas in

such a patriarchal environment? Further, how could she have gotten her work published, or even have had an opportunity to self-publish? It was not until after her years as court governess at Luneville, though before her departure for England, that her first novel Le

Triomphe de la verite (1748) appeared, published by Henry Thomas, a printer and bookseller in Nancy, capital of the French province of Lorraine. Its dedication to

Stanislas, "Sa Majeste le Roy de Pologne, Due de Lorraine et de Bar" (iii), indicates

Beaumont's desire to obtain this royal's favor, a common bid among unemployed intellectuals. Such approval would undoubtedly advance her fledgling writing career by promoting interest in and credibility for her work, encouraging readership and future subscriptions, thus allowing her to sustain herself financially. Royal protection might also secure her a paid position in the court itself, either as a tutor, court-appointed author, or

83 other subsidized capacity. Either scenario would have given her financial security, which

was certainly a priority for Beaumont in her current situation as unemployed single

mother.

There is, however, no record that such protection was forthcoming. Rather,

Beaumont relocated to London, where she found employment and relied on personal contacts and her own resources for the successful distribution of her work. She writes of her relationships with professionals and scholars in the introduction to her third

publication, the Nouveau magasinfran~ais, giving the impression of a salon-like

atmosphere operating in the French community of London. In that same work, Beaumont references the professional success of her first writing endeavor independent of the royal endorsement: "Mon premier Ouvrage ne fut que bon: aussi apprehendai-je longtemps qu'il ne passat chez l'Epicier. Enfin, par une exception ala regie, il fut vendu au bout de trois ans" (My first work was only good, so I worried for a long time that it would end up on the shelf. Fortunately, an exception to the rules allowed it to sell out in three years; 3).

Humility perhaps, but one can also read in such remarks a gentle acknowledgement of her own abilities as author and businesswoman. In fact, it appears that the lack of ro)'al

support followed by a certain degree of success may have encouraged this newly minted author to quickly assume the authorial authority that Stanislas was not prepared to give her. In the introduction toLe Triomphe de la verite, Beaumont expressly renounced any special consideration because of her gender ("Je ne demanderai point ames lecteurs une indulgence que mon sexe semble exiger" I I will not ask of my readers the indulgence that my gender seems to demand; vi), asking instead that her work be respected on a par

84 with the writings of her male colleagues and her female predecessors. Anticipating objections to her treatment of religion as a topic, she somewhat defensively makes her case by pointing out that women are already accepted when they write on other subjects:

"On voit sans s'etonner des Femmes s'appliquer ala Poesie, aux Langues, a l'Histoire, aux Mathematjques, a 1' Astronomie meme" (We see without surprise women applying themselves to Poetry, Languages, History, Mathematics, and even Astronomy; xi-xii).

She also mentions two seventeenth-century women writers, the poetess Antoinette

Deshoulieres and Anne Dacier, the first translator of 's and into

French, as examples of women's capabilities in addressing scholarly topics. Such defensive measures were certainly not unusual for her time. Suzanna van Dijk provides several examples of French critics who lace their reviews of women's works with appeals for indulgence in light of their gender. Although van Dijk notes that some of this rhetoric is applied to instances in which the subject matter might be considered inappropriate for a woman author (247), she nonetheless confirms the widespread tendency of discounting women's writings. Beaumont is therefore not so unusual in asserting so vigorously her right to engage important topics traditionally left to the examination of men.

Two years later, Beaumont's need for self-justification was on the decline.

Residing in London, she chose to dedicate her next work, Lettres diverses et critiques

(1750), to a woman, Lady Oglethorpe, who had introduced her into that city's aristocratic circles. Not a supplication or appeal, the dedication is instead a note of thanks to this excellent mentor, praising her good deeds and exemplary behavior as characteristics to be replicated in others. With the briefest nod to her equally deserving husband, Beaumont

85 remains focused on the woman who represents "un modele a toutes les personnes du

Sexe" (a model to all members of the Sex [of females]; 1: vi). That same year, in the first

issue ofthe monthly Nouveau magasinfranr;ais, the reader encounters a proud Beaumont

boldly announcing her credentials in the preface of this journalistic work that she formats

and edits, and to which she also contributes. She offers the reader a brief sketch of

herself, beginning with the fact that she is female, as readers will discern by "la

negligence de mon style" (my loose writing style; ii) and the "caprice" that dictates how

articles are assembled in each anthology, traits seen as traditionally female. Having made

all of this abundantly clear, this woman- and a foreign French woman at that- casts her readers an unambiguous invitation to partake in her collections. "C'est done une Femme

que vous etes invite de vous entretenir une fois par mois" (So it is a Woman that you are

invited to converse with once a month; 4). While she readily acknowledges that she may lose half her readership because of her gender, she goes on to point out that she has

already had two works published, both of which sold out. Her role and her qualifications established, she leaves the ultimate fate of her work in the hands of her readers. If she has lost half of them by announcing her gender, she clearly hopes to retain the other half

because of it.

Note that the reading population of London at that time comprised a significant number of Francophone members. The French language was very popular among

Britain's elite, and was thought to be an essential part of any aristocratic child's education (see chapter 3 below). In addition, many French people lived in England for personal reasons or for political ones. Voltaire is one of the most famous examples of the

86 latter scenario. He lived in England from 1730 to 1733 following his release from a

second stay in the Bastille. Rousseau, Montesquieu, and many others also spent long

periods of time across the Channel and were welcomed by the French and Francophone communities there.

By the time she publishes the Education complete in 1753, Beaumont is confident enough in her role of author/intellectual to speak of "man traite sur !'education" (my treatise on education; Preface 1, emphasis added) in the very first sentence of the Preface.

Citing as her source a text by French historian Charles Rollin, 1 she immediately indicates it weakness ("Mr. Rolain ... on peut regarder son ouvrage comme un chef-d'oeuvre.

Mais cet ouvrage quelque excellent qu'il soit, n'est pas propres a tousles ages" (Mr.

Rolain ... his work can be seen as a masterpiece. But as excellent as this work is, it is not

appropriate for all ages; Preface 1). Her treatise promotes her own more suitable method which, she adds, she has implemented successfully for years. Again, Beaumont justifies her authority through practical experience, most notably knowledge of her material and her students, an advantage that she maintains over the majority of her contemporaries.

She also establishes herself as an expert on childhood education in particular, encouraging parents and future teachers to read those writers whose works on the subject address the kinds of requirements necessary to instruct young people: "Mr de Fenelon,

Mr. Addison, mon Traite d'education, etc." (11). Fenelon, the seventeenth-century

French theologian, philosopher, and educator at the court of Louis XIV, was a well­ known intellectual and expert on instructional techniques, renowned for his popular

Traite de l' education des filles (1687) and his classroom classic Les A ventures de

87 Telemaque (1699), one of the most widely read historical novels of the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries (Jacques Le Brun, author of the preface to the 1995 edition of

Telemaque, has shown the that the work's influence extended even into the early

twentieth century with a very popular re-edition of Telemaque in 1920; Preface 7). For

those of her British readers less familiar with the Frenchman, Beaumont amplifies her list

of colleagues with Joseph Addison (1672-1719), co-founder of the newspaper The

Spectator with his long-time friend Richard Steele and author of the play Cato, A

Tragedy (1712). One of the best known and best loved authors of the early eighteenth century, Addison and his newspaper offered information to readers as a means of

instructing them with lessons of morality and virtuous behavior. Modern critic W.M.

Spellman even comments that Addison and Steele used The Spectator and its successor

The Guardian to promote the ideals of John Locke, promoting what Spellman calls

"Locke's anti-authoritarian sensibility" (124). Putting her own work, her "traite d'education," on the same plane of importance as these male giants suggests Beaumont's

strong confidence in herself and her work.

Although gender may have kept Beaumont's personal confidence a bit subdued in the introductions to her earliest novels, there is nothing hesitant in her ringing endorsements of the female gender beginning with the very first of her essays. This voice is particularly clear in her discussions of many of the philosophes, whose intellectual talents she often openly admired while publicly criticizing their personal behavior and ideological positions, including their stance against the Catholic religion. Beaumont's first publication, the Lettre en reponse a "L'Annee Merveilleuse" (1748), was a seven-

88 page response to the young philosopher Abbe Coyer's Anm?e merveilleuse (1748), countering his positions with a clarification of sorts. In this short essay, Beaumont's

alarm at the notion of women exchanging roles with men as outlined by Coyer comes not

from that author's tongue-in-cheek proposal itself, but rather from what Beaumont reads

as the misplaced anticipation expressed by her female correspondent at such a possibility.

"Je suis indignee de la joie que vous cause 1' esperance de ce changement" (I am indignant that the hope of such change would cause you joy; Lettre en reponse 2).

Instead, insisting that such a change would be disastrous for women, Beaumont responds to his three main traits that differentiate men from and make them superior to women:

"parler peu, penser beaucoup, et dominer" (to speak little, think much, and dominate; 61).

Arguing the great worth of women's gifts, she wants them treasured rather than traded away for masculine characteristics that have been made to appear more valuable by those same men. Of the fact that women speak more than men, she explains, "Si elle [la

Nature] nous a douees d'une plus grande facilite de parler que l'individu de votre espece, c'est qu'elle a prevue que nous parlerions mieux" (If she [Nature] endowed us with a greater facility for speech than those of your kind, it is because she anticipated that we would speak better; 2). Thus invoking the concept first argued by Christine de Pizan in the fifteenth century, and still vibrant in the twentieth-century feminist discourse of such leading figures as Carole Pateman, Beaumont argues that women must be seen as different but of the same worth, "autonomous, equal, yet sexually different beings from men" (Pate man, The Disorder of Women.l4 ). Five centuries of subsequent debate have not achieved the reorientation of masculinist assumptions that continue to position male

89 characteristics as the acceptable norm against which female traits are judged for relative value.

Coyer claims that the metamorphosis has already begun, and that women are already taking on the roles of men: "elles laissent aux hommes la fabrique des romans, pour donner des modeles de Lettres et les anecdotes sur l'Histoire; elles ont meme force le sanctuaire des Sciences" (they leave the production of novels to men so they can create

Humanities models and Historical anecdotes; they have even broken into the sanctuary of the Sciences; 63). Beaumont appropriates his words to make her points, demonstrating how his essay attempts to discredit "l'honneur que notre Sexe fait aujourd'hui ala

Republique des Lettres" (the honor that our gender bestows today on the Republic of

Letters; 6). To demonstrate the comic inevitability of his prediction, Coyer leans on the

Ancients to support his argument, citing Egyptian hieroglyphics and Plato's pronouncements of men and women exchanging occupations: "Le divin Platon ne se contente pas d'annoncer ce prodige, il en decrit encore les preludes: 'la Nature,' ce sont ses paroles, 'commencera son ouvrage par la partie la plus difficile, avant de changer les corps, elle changera les idees et les inclinations"' (The divine Plato is not satisfied to announce this prodigious event, he describes its introduction: 'Nature,' these are her words, 'will begin this task by the most difficult part; before changing the body she will change the thoughts and the inclinations'; Coyer 56-7). Beaumont responds with some

Ancients as well, naming the legendary Semiramis, Deborah, Judith, and Esther, women leaders who were obviously just as capable as men without any need for a gender exchange to achieve important victories. Focusing on her own era, she notes the two

90 successive queens on the throne of England, rulers "dont on admire la conduite" (whose conduct is admired; 5). She raises the physiological argument of Creation, noting that

God first created Adam from "une poussiere vile" (a vile dust; 5), whereas Eve was his final work, his masterpiece: "11 forme la Femme; tout est accompli. 11 cesse alors de creer de nouvelles Creatures" (He shapes Woman; everything is completed. He then stops creating new Creatures; 5).

Yet if physical and mental assets are not enough to prove her case, Beaumont delivers her final argument in describing women's inner moral dimension, the superior spirit that men have tried to stifle by enclosing them in a world of minutiae. Beaumont insists to her correspondent it is rather women's heart that is their "triomphe" and that encompasses those honorable characteristics that men are incapable of achieving and have thus discounted. Virtue tops that list, and she adds that men "se sont crus dispenses de la necessite d'etre vertueux, par l'impossibilite dele devenir: et voila l'origine de ces lois si contraire a l'equite" (have believed themselves exempt from the need to be virtuous, due to the impossibility of their achieving it; that is the origin of those laws so contrary to parity; 7). Beaumont suggests to the reader that the feminine traits have been superior all along, though diminished in their worth and stifled in their innate development and leadership potential by men's superior marketing skills. Joan Hinde

Stewart correctly interprets this type of rhetoric as "an example of a subordinated group using the marks of its subordination as images of power" (Gynographs 33). This is in sharp contrast to modern critic Jean Bloch's claim thatBeaumont's essays are merely a one-time outburst of feminine outrage, written less as an expression of authentic feminist

91 thought than as a means to "make a quick penny after the annulment of her marriage in

1745" (34). 2 Bloch paints Beaumont as an orthodox writer who "preach[es] female virtue and social conformity" (34 ), obviously subscribing to the patriarchal reading that such later critics as Grimm and Saint-Beuve applied to Beaumont's works. Goodman finds this same tendency in such twentieth-century critics as Cassirer, Gay, and Darnton, calling the latter's approach to eighteenth-century writings in general "Rousseauean," "trapped within masculinist assumptions that mask the role of women in the cultural practices of the French Enlightenment" (70, 73). Although Bloch's comment appears based on a reading of Patricia Clancy's excellent article on Beaumont's pedagogical writings, she misses the point of Clancy's argument that Beaumont is an innovator, and focuses instead on the obvious superficial conformity to societal norms that the writings themselves display. In fact, Beaumont's essay introduces a sustained written appeal to women to take back their natural advantage by discarding the frivolous attitudes that men have encouraged and by reclaiming their natural potential. Instead of a single outburst,

Beaumont's essay should be read as an early step in a lifelong commitment to women's intellectual parity.

Another of Beaumont's direct expressions of her critical perspective occurred in the letter she penned to "Monsieur D. C." at the end of Volume I of the Lettres diverses et critiques (1750), a letter that the contemporary reader quickly deduced as addressed to

Cn!billon fils. 3 This surprising nine-page text begins by noting her own average intellectual abilities ("Nee dans la classe des genies mediocres" I Born into the class of mediocre geniuses; 173). Beaumont immediately compliments her addressee on his

92 talented father who provided him with exceptional training, concluding that expectations from him are therefore lofty. She is one of those who expect great things of him, adding that she has read his works with "ardeur" (176). It is no surprise, then that she scolds him for the content of his latest publication, "vos bijoux surtout," which she notes "m' ont choques dans plus d'un endroit" (Your gems in particular, which shocked me in more than one place; 179). Given the date of Beaumont's letter and the topics that she describes, the reader can assume that her complaint is with the very popular Le Sopha

(1742).4 What is so shocking? Not the style, which she admires for its clarity, its grace and elegance. It is his lack of judgment in belittling women and making a joke of the institution of marriage. The amorality that she discerns in the texts alarms her, specifically because his engaging style makes his publications so popular. Writing from her base in England, she is able to attest to his popularity on both sides of the Channel, while also making the point that "les gens de bon gout, dont, par parentheses, le nombre n'est pas ici le plus petit, gemissent de voir le gout de !'indecent, du frivole, passer de chez-vous dans leur lie" (people of good taste, who, by the way, are not few in number here, tremble to find a taste for the indecent, the frivolous, make its way from your home to their Island; 181). It is her sincere hope that he now turn his talents to better use.

Yet it is the post script that is most fascinating in this letter. There Beaumont not only reminds her reader of her gender, she also notes that Monsieur D.C. does not seem to have a very good opinion of women and might therefore misinterpret her letter as

"l'effet d'une vengeance" (the product of a grudge; 181). To counter such a claim, she identifies herself as not at all in conformity with "les traits dont vous nous accablez sans

93 cesse. Je n 'etais pas jolie a vingt ans, j 'en ai quarante; je ne suis ni devote, ni coquette ...

je suis neutre dans les querelles qui regardent les femmes" (the traits of which you

constantly accuse us. I was not pretty at twenty, now I am forty; I am neither a fanatic nor

a flirt ... I am neutral in the quarrels that pertain to women; 182). In this way, Beaumont

eliminates her external characteristics of feminine gender, and instead promotes or even

neuters herself as an objective, unbiased critic, participating in the same critical discourse

of any male reader who might well question Monsieur D.C.'s motivation in writing such

misguided, corrupting material debasing to women and unworthy of his literary ability.

Modern day feminist critic Carole Pateman argues this very concept in The

Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory when she rewrites a

critical theory that abstracts women's bodies so that they can then be more easily

incorporated into a public sphere that would otherwise exclude them. Arguing that it is

the physical side of women that poses a threat to the patriarchal system of power in the

early modern period, Pateman writes "women's bodies symbolize everything opposed to

political order ... women have been included [into the political order] as 'women'; that

is, as beings whose sexual embodiment prevents them enjoying the same political

standing as men" (4). Although she does not specifically reference Beaumont, Pateman's theory is directly applicable to Beaumont's bold dissection of the two parts in her letter to

Monsier D. C., so that the female body can remain part of the private world that Patemen posits would "pose a threat to political order" (4 ), while reason, now stripped of its passionate physicality, can operate freely in the public world. Although she portrays herself as an inferior talent, she clearly considers her intellect capable of critiquing the

94 work of a recognized "genius," indeed one who would go on to become a prominent

Enlightenment voice.

This is not to say, however, that Beaumont resembles the rather pathetic figure of the Enlightenment woman that such modern critics as Bloch, Joan Landes, and Nanerl

Keohane discern in the writings of Rousseau. As a male creation, that woman must

abandon all the traditional characteristics that defined her, in particular her emotion, if

she is to become a rational thinker in Cartesian form. Instead, like Pizan, far from repudiating her gender, Beaumont, as she clearly demonstrates in this letter to Monsieur

D. C., demonstrates her distance from all that Crebillon has claimed as characteristics of womanhood, in order to shatter his stereotype of the woman's physical appeal to man's eye. Rather than de-feminize herself by assuming masculine traits, she is insistent on her gender throughout the essay, and so is clearly asserting that she can maintain both her womanly persona and a rational way of thinking.

In all of these early introductions, explanations of her methodology, and fictional story lines, Beaumont repeatedly emphasizes the primary importance of recognizing a student's individuality, and adjusting instructional styles and materials to it for positive teaching results. With so much of her work geared toward young girls and women, one could easily adduce that Beaumont's work applies only to the female gender. Yet in fact, what is so striking about her work- in particular these earliest writings- is the inclusive nature of her methodology, focusing on the need to recognize every child's inner nature and teach to that unique individual. Her first novel, Le Triomphe de la verite ( 1748), is written for "1' education des jeunes gens" (the education of young people; vii), later more

95 precisely identified as "celles pour qui j'ecris particulierement" (those [females] for whom I write in particular; Preface ix). It is the story of a young man who narrates his own educational process, in a sort of bildungsroman for Enlightenment readers, in which the role of mentor is primarily fulfilled by the boy's father, complemented by his mother's insight. There is no specificity of the students' gender in the treatise Education complete (1753), where the reader knows only that the lessons are directed to future , , and rulers of state, and that the volume itself is offered to the Royal

Family of the Princess of Wales for their use.

It is not until her most famous work, the Magasin des enfants, that Beaumont introduces an all-female list of characters to assist in the lessons designed to teach young people to learn to think, speak, and act responsibly, each according to her own inclination. Here again Beaumont reaches out to royalty in the Dedication, this time to the young Imperial Highness Paul Petrovitch ( 17 54-1801 ), grandson of Peter the Great (and nephew of Elisabeth, Empress of Russia from 17 41 to 17 62. Citing the excellent role model offered the young prince by his ancestor Peter, "un heros qui efface tous ceux qui l'ont precede"'(a hero who eclipses all those who preceded him; Dedication), Beaumont then presents the influential women of Russian royalty. Beaumont first introduces

Catherine, joined in union with Peter instead of simply as his wife, thus inferring parity in this woman who is Peter's "Mro"ine, un collegue" (heroine, a colleague; Dedication) and is part of young Paul Petrovitch's direct ancestry. However, it is in his aunt Elisabeth, daughter of this royal powerhouse of Catherine and Peter, that Beaumont finds the most illustrious example of a just, intelligent, and powerful ruler for the young prince: "elle

96 reunit au meme degre, et les qualites qui font des grands rois, et celles qui sont le partage des personnes de son sexe" (she unites in equal parts both the qualities that make great kings and those that are the lot of those of her sex; Dedication). Elizabeth was generally considered one of Russia's most beloved rulers, and historians note her diplomatic skills and her even hand, which allowed her to rule for twenty-one years without ever signing an execution warrant. Such examples of benevolent yet powerful women rulers attest to

Beaumont's familiarity with the Russian empire and presage her future ties with its court.5 More significant, however, is their reinforcing of the importance that Beaumont places on the leadership roles that women are capable of assuming at all levels of society, from their domestic influence to their political directives.

By the time the Magasin des adolescentes is published in 1760, Beaumont's focus on the condition of women has begun to expand to the methodological applications that are critical to her pedagogy. The success of her Magasin des enfants most certainly affected this shift: "Lebon accueil qu'on a fait au Mpgasin des enfants, tant a Londres que dans les pays etrangers, m'a determine a donner celui des Adolescentes" (the favorable reception that the Children's Magazine has received, both in London and in foreign countries, has decided me to produce one for Young Ladies; Magasin des adolescentes 1: i). Of course, the fact that the volumes are written for young ladies speaks to her emphasis on providing her female readers and their mentors with a guide for educating them to deal competently and virtuously with the temptation of the adult world into which they are. about to enter. She insists that these young ladies, in the general ages of fourteen through eighteen, are capable of learning her lessons and of understanding

97 them. They can read a text, determine that the author's premise is false, and explain why it is so. "Aujourd'hui les femmes se piquent de tout lire; histoire, politique, ouvrage de philosophie, de religion; il faut done les mettre en etat de porter un jugement sur par rapport ace qu'elles lisent, et leur apprendre a discerner le vrai d'avec le faux" (today women pride themselves on reading everything; history, politics, philosophical and religious works; therefore we must train them to be able to make a sound judgment about what they read, and teach them to distinguish the true from the false; Magasin des adolescentes I: xx). Her tone has become less broadly inclusive of all readers, as if, having made her points on parity in earlier writings, she can now deal more exclusively with the area of greatest need, that of instructing young girls of all ages to become astute adults.

Beaumont pushes gender parity in another direction when, in January 1750, she introduces the first volume of the Nouveau magasin Fran(;ois, thereby becoming one of the first "femmes journalistes" of the Enlightenment.6 Her monthly journal featured scientific treatises and debates by recognized experts of the Royal Academy of London, historical essays and letters by Voltaire and other noted intellectuals, and literary commentaries. Clearly Beaumont took some inspiration from the Spectator, the celebrated British newspaper published daily from 1711 to 1713 (then again briefly in

1714). That journal's objective was to furnish information to all readers in general, but in particular to the emerging middle class, by providing a wide array of articles on literature, philosophy, history, and social, political, and moral topics. Beaumont's journal had similar goals but targeted more instructional entries aimed at a more diverse readership

98 that included women. Many of the articles included in the Nouveau magasin Fran~ois

were the work of noted researchers. The work of the popular Fran<;oise de Graffigny

appeared in a 1751 issue, including excerpts of her play Cenie. Monsieur de Voltaire is

also an early contributor to several issues during 1750. His submissions include the short

story "Babouc, ou le monde comme il va," the "Epitre au Due de Richelieu," and his

"Anecdotes" on both Louis XIV and Peter the Great. Their texts, along with others by

such scholars as the scientists Le Cat and Haller and legal scholar Thourneyser, live up to

her promise of high-quality material she has advertised for her journal. At the same time,

of course, they instantiate the quality of the journal itself, as one in which such worthy

contributors are regularly involved. As both editor and publisher of this journal over a

three-year period, Beaumont wrote the introduction to the series, selected the texts for each issue, responded to both her supporters and detractors in thoughtful letters from the editor, and wrote numerous articles for the series. Although her introduction to her

readers identified her as a woman, the journal's broad base of scholarly texts, renowned

authors, and literary genres showed her readers that the production and assimilation of

such thoughtful, challenging information was within the reach of anyone who aspired to

self-improvement, regardless of gender.

The direction of Beaumont's writings, from the very beginning and in all her various genres, is one of mentorship and guidance both to those who seek to improve their condition, and to those who have found little or no representation or encouragement from other authoritative sources. By establishing her own credibility as a recognized author in the lineage of respected female predecessors, who debates as a colleague with

99 the male intellectuals of her era, and whose gender has not stopped her from utilizing her mental skills to improve herself and her actions, Beaumont presents herself as the model for her female readers.

Portraying the Feminine Voice

Beaumont is clearly concerned that her women readers feel comfortable with her texts, and that they find suitable material in them for teaching their children, particularly their female children. The thoughtful and precise introductions and dedications of the majority of Beaumont's writings are designed to encourage such adoption by her audience. The female reader identifies with Beaumont by her gender and by her assurances that the texts to follow are not only suitable for the female reader but are, in many cases, written specifically for her. Once such assurance is in place, the stories themselves can proceed, and the characters within them can enact the ideals that

Beaumont wishes so urgently to communicate. Independent, rational, and insightful women are always part of her literary landscape. If her most openly challenging discourses on the overall potential of women appear in her two earliest pamphlets, the

Lettre en reponse and the Arret Solennel, all the fictional and non-fictional heroines throughout her oeuvre embrace their roles as active and equal socio-political participants.

On the surface, Beaumont's women operate primarily in those areas historically relegated to them: religion, social welfare, and education. As noted in chapter 1 above, there appeared to be little interest by men in these essentially domestic topics, a lack of attention that allowed women authors to claim them and to situate their texts within these domains. There the characters could express themselves and interact in social situations

100 that were non-threatening to the patriarchal society that reserved its more abstract and intellectual environments for its male members. As teachers, mothers, wives, or students,

Beaumont's women could engage in the type of mentoring and general support to other women that this author championed, so that her texts became a place for subtle

apprenticeships, havens for the female readers. At the same time, the condescending attitudes of both fictive male characters and the male critics, authors, and other who recognized only the superficial characteristics of a didactic governess or a doting mother's correspondence offered a relatively unencumbered conduit for delivering subtle new perspectives on traditional notions of women's occupations and preoccupations.

Walking in the footsteps of Christine de Pizan and her Cite des Dames ( 1405),

Beaumont's heroines find their roots in a tradition of capable ancestresses, whose legacies reinforce the more modern portrayals of educated woman capable and interested in higher learning, self-improvement, and the sharing such wealth with other women.

Like Pizan's fictional heroine Christine, Beaumont's characters often call up these legendary women - in particular from biblical sources - to validate their assertions of woman's potential for leadership, scholarship, and intellectual prowess. Both authors reference Semiramis, queen of antiquity whose skill in battle equaled her prowess in ruling her kingdom. In fact, as we saw in chapter 1, Christine's fictional character Lady

Reason makes Semiramis the first stone placed in the foundation of the new city. Queen

Esther is similarly a recurring example in both women's work, and she is cited in the

Lettres de Madame du Montier as well as in the earliest Magasins, often echoing

Christine's words: "Cette fois encore ce fut une femme [Esther] que Dieu choisit pour

101 sauver son peuple, comme ill'avait fait au temps de Judith" (once again it was a woman

[Esther] whom God chose to save his people, as he had done in the time of Judith; Cite des Dames 172). In no less glowing terms, the fictional Madame du Montier advises her daughter to follow in the footsteps of this exemplary heroine: "Souvenez-vous de cette grande Reine dont vous lisiez l'Histoire avec admiration, !'incomparable Esther; comme elle, Dieu vous destine a faire connaitre son nom" (Remember this great Queen whose story you read in admiration, the incomparable Esther; like her, God has destined you to make his name known; 5). Such statements serve as powerful reminders of the important roles that have been allocated to these woman selected directly by God as his messengers on earth, chosen over men to fulfill tasks of great importance. Their stories, incorporated into the holiest of texts for generations, cannot be disputed nor can their authority be challenged. Beaumont's representation is quite different from the typical portrait of

Esther in the preceding century, when Racine's Esther (1689) portrayed a heroine guided by her uncle, her husband, and God. Racine's distinctly patriarchal perspective renders his Esther a more submissive heroine, pushed by the biblical Mordecai to primp for the beauty contest of the king, ordered to keep her ethnic identity a secret, and later - having attained the position as queen of Persia - reprimanded for hesitating to speak to the king about the impending doom of her Jewish people. "Quoi? Lorsque vous voyez perir votre patrie,/ Pour quelque chose, Esther, vous comptez votre vie!/ Dieu parle, et d'un mortel vous craignez le courroux!/ Que dis-je? Votre vie, Esther, est-elle a vous?" (What? When you see your country dying,/ Make your life count for something, Esther!/ God speaks, and you fear the crown of a mortal! What am I saying? Esther, is your life yours?; 205-

102 209). Racine's famous but relatively compliant and timorous Esther is like an interruption

in the feminist lineage extending from medieval Christine de Pizan to Beaumont, whose

Esther is the paradigm of womanly strength and leadership. The author seeks to instill in

her eighteenth-century readers another model to be actively emulated.

There is more than just historical example in such early work to guide readers

toward an alternative perspective on women's potential contributions to society. It is

Beaumont's characters themselves that represent the possibilities available to all those

willing to invest effort into applying Beaumont's principles. In lesson after lesson, the

fictive Miss Bonne in the Magasin des enfants directs the dialogues with the young

women students, answering their questions while not just encouraging them to memorize

biblical and historical tales, but giving them examples of ancestral women who made

admirable choices that added value to their own lives and the lives of those around them.

As in the lesson on Adam and Eve, after praising her student for learning the story, she

asks "est-ce que seulement pour etre savants que nous apprenons des histoires?" (is it

only to be knowledgeable that we learn stories? Magasin des enfants 1: 55). She solicits a response from her other students, who recognize that one must learn from these examples

so that the mistakes are avoided and the virtues acquired. The various responses expressed by each of the students provide optional alternatives to readers, who can then find in these lessons those points that apply specifically to their own situations, their own lives.

Similar dialogues can be found in Beaumont's novels, from the early Triomphe de la verite to the epistolary novels written two decades later. The dual model of young

103 person and older mentor serves the novice who is anxious to act in a socially responsible

manner but who is often confronted with difficult choices and tempting alternatives. The

mentor then steps in, providing a solid example of the virtuous behavior that the younger

person so desires, and also positioning herself to offer her protege practical solutions for

attaining that status. Beaumont's better-known examples of this technique are found in

the Magasins, of course, and in her four epistolary novels. Serialized in the Nouveau

magasin Fran~ois, her first epistolary novel, Lettres de Madame du Montier ala

Marquise de ***, safille, positions women as conscious proponents of non-traditional

behavior in a traditional society. In rich dialogue between a mother and her newly

married daughter struggling to make her way through court intrigues and marital

dilemmas, maternal counsel varies from advice on handling jealous court attendants to

dealing with smallpox and the death of a child. The wise mother knows, however, that husbands can be misguided, so amid sage advice on obedience and respect, Madame du

Montier also prepares her daughter for alternatives. "Quand vous serez dans la necessite

de penser ou d'agir autrement que votre Epoux, ne heurtez jamais de front son gout ... faites en sorte, s'il est possible, de faire nai'tre chez lui ces expedients, en sorte qu'il croie

suivre sa volonte dans le temps qu'il sera dirige par la v6tre" (when it becomes necessary to think or act differently than your Husband, never clash head-on with his desire ... arrange things, if possible, to nurture these ideas in him, such that he believes he is following his own will while he is being driven by yours; 1: 8).

Although this advice may sound like a foreshadowing of Rousseau's Julie or

Sophie, whose sole purpose was to serve as guides to their husbands' acquisition of

104 knowledge and reason, Beaumont does not lock her women into the domestic rehabilitation that constrains such heroines as Rousseau's, and which often leaves them despondent when their efforts with their husbands fail. Beaumont uses her mentors to encourage their young apprentices to set virtuous examples for their husbands in the hope of redirecting any negative actions they may take. So in Lettres de Madame du Montier et de Ia Marquise de *** safille the young Marquise brings about a change of heart in her husband with her patience and virtuous behavior in the face of adversity. Yet all the while, she maintains a positive spirit with the help of her mother, who- as in Mme de

Lafayette's Princesse de Cleves- offers her a feminine source of support that includes alternatives when the Marquise sees herself close to faltering or in need of guidance. This approach is in opposition to Rousseau's Julie, whose advice and direction come primarily from her husband in the form of directives rather than mentorship. Julie loses the company and support of her mother prior to her marriage, and is ultimately deprived of her only other source of female alliance at the death of her cousin Claire. Although

Rousseau's Julie and Beaumont's Marquise appear to have similarly subordinate roles as helpmates to their husbands, Beaumont provides her fictional heroine with a network of feminine support and a view beyond the domestic panorama of her husband's activities.

Beaumont's characters, similar to those of Pizan or de Lafayette, lean instead on the encouragement of other women to designate alternate options for them, stretching the limits of traditional social constraints or popular opinion.

The mentor-mentee relationship is also present in Beaumont's first two novels, Le

Triomphe de la verite, and Civan, roi de Bungo, written six years apart and published on

105 either side of Education complete, Beaumont's pedagogical guide for royal children. In

these texts and the others published prior to the Magasins, student gender is mixed but

the important role of the aristocracy as leaders of the people is apparent. Also clear is

Beaumont's deference to the tradition of a patriarchal monarchy that she chooses not to

question. In fact, her female mentor in Civan is first introduced to the reader as a man, for

Dulica understands the necessity of disguising her gender if she is to function without

drawing attention to her actions in Japanese society.7 Where she does invoke change is in

the type of education that these students - in particular the future rulers - are provided,

and in the providers of that education. She positions her mentors as women of

intelligence, capable of thoughtful discussion leading students to logical, reasoned

conclusions. They are women of strong will, overcoming emotional or physical adversity

to ensure the completion of their responsibilities to their students. In Civan, Dulica,

educator of future king Civan of Bungo and the princess Mera, takes over the role as

principal mentor when her husband Asor dies. Grief-stricken, Dulica is able to dominate

her grief with reason, and we are told that "elle consentit a prolonger sa vie parce qu' elle etait encore necessaire a ses chers enfants" (she agreed to extend her life because she was

still needed by her dear children; I: 72). Thus the plan to provide young Prince Civan

with an education outside the royal court and far from its sycophants as set in motion by

Asor and Dulica continues steadily forward, with Dulica ably ensuring the implementation of every facet of that education.8 Since Dulica had always been an

integral part of the plan, her assumption of its leadership appears quite natural in the text,

so that readers accept its adoption, unorthodox by eighteenth-century standards, as the

106 logical course of action. This plot line thus entails a subtle shift, once again, in the traditional, patriarchal structure. In fact, when Dulica and Civan arrive in England, the narrator is quite critical of Henry VIII, whose surrender to his "passions" allowed him to

fail his people and to succumb to the unscrupulous recommendations he received from his advisor Cardinal Woolsey.9 Instead of leading Europe as its proud commander, Dulica

says, he is "le tombeau de lui-meme" (his own tomb; 1: 172), destined to leave behind a country in chaos and controversy because of a reign dominated by passion rather than reason.

The image of the well-mannered woman that saw its formation in the seventeenth century salon and its parallel literary representations often appears in Beaumont's novels

as fictional dilemmas of good versus evil, and moral versus amoral. In chapter 1 above, we saw that it was a generally acceptable practice to attribute to elite women such characteristics as polite behavior, "bienseance," and "honnetete" able to encourage civilized behavior in men. For Beaumont, this image is implicit in her heroines, who embody the period's high standards of social conduct and moral behavior for women. Yet her female characters do not languish in despair, simply waiting for someone or something else to resolve their difficulties, or choosing to accept their fate dutifully and generally with great suffering. Although discouraged at times, Beaumont's women always remain positive and rarely even consider the possibility of failing. In the face of adversity, they consider the options and quite rationalistically select those most likely to have a positive outcome. Alyssa Johns, whose study of Beaumont's social consciousness will be explored further in chapter 4, sees Beaumont's women as a response to the female

107 characters created by such male authors as Richardson, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and

Rousseau. In contrast to those masculine viewpoints that portray women as victims,

Johns sees Beaumont's women as "heroines who do not suffer and die in order to fulfill a

fantasy of virgin innocence and saintliness, but who meet substantial challenges and

enjoy productive lives as citizens, wives, and mothers" (155). It is this ability to reason, to calculate potential outcomes, and to consciously embrace the expectation of the virtuous and harmonious outcomes that characterizes Beaumont's women. Madame du

Montier advises her daughter, the Marquise de **, as she prepares to enter the "grand theatre" of the Royal Court in Turin, "ce pays ou regne la duplicite, la fourberie, la trahison, !'ambition, l'envie, lajalousie ... n'est dangereux que pour ceux qui y entrent le bandeau sur les yeux. Grace au Ciel, les votres sont ouverts" (this land where duplicity, falseness, betrayal, ambition, envy, jealousy reign ... is only dangerous for those whose eyes are blindfolded. By the grace of Heaven, yours are open; Lettres de Madame de

Montier, 1: 42). Her straightforward analysis of the trials that lie ahead is critical, then, to generating a workable approach or plan and, subsequently, to anticipating a positive outcome. Without this knowledge in hand, the Marquise will be far less likely to analyze difficulties as they arise and counter them with reason and- the clear objective- moral clarity.

This is not to say that Beaumont advocates that women ignore a responsibility toward their husbands, and even their fathers. Deference to such masculine authority is abundant in her writings: Madame du Montier, Dulica, and Miss Bonne clearly recommend respect when the male figure merits that respect. It is when the male

108 authority figure operates in a less than acceptable manner, disappoints, or disappears, that

the woman must assume his role and handle whatever public or private situation results.

Thus when Dulica's Asor dies, or Madame du Montier's son-in-law abandons his wife,

the woman puts aside any debilitating emotion and proceeds with the tasks at hand. Such

later novels as La Nouvelle Clarice contain more overt characterizations of the masculine

prejudices against women's intellectual capacities. Early in that novel, Lady Harriet

writes to her friend Clarice about her new husband. Describing most men as unwilling to

accept advice from their wives ("leurs humbles moities" I their humble halves] and

amazed that her own husband seems to be an exception to the male norm, she reports: "il entend raison, et n'a pas la sotte manie de croire qu'elle ne peut sortir de notre bouche"

(he hears reason, and does not have the foolish habit of believing that it cannot come from our mouths; 1: 38).

Modem critic Betsey Hearne also makes the case for Beaumont's characters, independence and less than submissive attitude. In her comparison of "La Belle et la

Bete" with the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, believed by many to be a major source of inspiration for the French fairy tale, Hearne asserts first that in the Greek myth

"Psyche is left with no choice; she is taken," and describes Beauty's situation as "entirely in her own hands. Her control of the situation is emphasized over and over in the Beast's assurance that everything in the palace is hers to command" (15). Although stressing a difference in emphasis on the morality of love and sexuality respectively, Hearne quickly turns to focus on Beaumont's fore grounding of the importance of self-determination in the lives of women. As she summarizes, "it is impossible not to notice the conflict

109 between her lip service to traditional feminine subservience and her surprised, ill­ concealed recognition that such a condition is alterable" ( 17). Although one might

question Hearne's rather exaggerated terms, she rightly concludes that Beaumont encouraged her students and her readers to challenge and alter their interpretation of the

stereotypical role of eighteenth-century women denying both their intelligence and their

potential. Overall, however, Hearne describes the story as a recasting of "amour courtois:

the male serving the female, the female saying no, the male suffering faithfully of

lovesickedness, the female saying yes" (19). By explaining away the alternative thought

process that Beaumont introduces to her readers as merely a resituating of traditional

patriarchal behavior, Hearne minimizes the shift that occurs in the feminine conversation found in Beaumont's texts. For Beaumont, the conflict between recognizing societal responsibilities - the order of things, as it were - and the need for women to express themselves fully through personal and individual choices, is at issue in her texts. What

she proposes to her readers is that they have alternatives, and her characters demonstrate the range of those alternatives to those who choose to adopt and integrate them into their own lives.

The Beaumont Difference: A Feminine Alternative

Most directly in her essays, but also in her fictional heroines, Beaumont creates a positive model for women constructed of "feminine" characteristics shown to be effective for reflective thought, communication, and action. She presents these traits as highly desirable, and positions women as equal to and even superior to men in these most important facets of social existence. She thus creates a scenario meant to incite women to

110 rethink the uselessness of trendy, frivolous behavior (grooming, games, and gossip) for the rich potential of more noteworthy activities designed to improve the condition of

society at large. Beaumont uses such reproofs as those found in the Lettre en reponse or the fairy tale of "Aurora and Aimee" in the Magasin des enjants (II: 323-40)10 to illustrate the fulfillment that women can find through personal intellectual stimulation and knowledge of the world around them. In this way, Beaumont appears to be situating her discourse within the accepted hierarchy of power traditionally understood as male­ female, as Pateman has suggested (see chapter 1 above).

Beaumont certainly does not enter into the rigorous questioning of women's roles or stereotypes that is integral to modern-day feminist theory. As an eighteenth-century woman, she accepted the societal norm that placed men at the head of the household, the political state, and the religious institution. Her texts seem to confirm what Servanne

Woodward describes as "paradoxically ... the subservient nature of their duties to deny their likeness to servants" (ix), and commit her women to reactionary roles rather than positions of assertive action. Yet her writings also reflect a consistent spirit of feminine capability, individuality, and personal determination that countermand the notion of subservience. How can these be reconciled, and what message did Beaumont actually convey through her works? Where was she actually leading her readers, intentionally or otherwise?

We have seen that women authors who preceded Beaumont participated in a certain change in voice that was manifest in their own writings. French readers of

Beaumont and other women readily discern inspiration from the famed medieval models

111 of Christine de Pizan' s heroine and her three dames seeking to build a new social order,

where women were responsible for their own futures. Neoclassical Madame de Lafayette

had opened the door to non-traditional choices for women, choices that overrode personal

passion for a more peaceful solution in which women took back control of their destinies.

In the eighteenth century, Fran~oise de Graffigny offered a similar option through Zilia,

whose choice not to marry Deterville resulted in an outcry of resistance from the literary

public. Critic Rachel Mesch notes Zilia' s strength in maintaining her position: "The

instinct to give up (as did Montesquieu's Roxane) 11 is countered by the stronger instinct

to express her feelings" (2). Although control of their destiny is the aim of most

protagonists, male or female, the manner in which such control is accomplished by women is reflected quite differently by eighteenth-century male and female authors.

Beaumont's characters also represent this self-determining attitude toward their destiny embodied in the preceding examples. Her women, fictional or real, seek workable

solutions to seemingly impossible situations, from such basic scenarios as the search to cure the smallpox in one son that has already taken another's life in Lettres de Madame du Montier et de la Marquise de *** safille (258-65) to the daring escape up a chimney and over a roof that Clarisse engineers from her greedy and tyrannical father (La

Nouvelle Clarisse 161-3). They find good where evil seems to rule, and create positive goals in spite of overwhelmingly negative options in every visible direction, as Miss

Bonne teaches the young girls to do in the Magasin des enfants and subsequent journals.

Beaumont's women often expand the traditional limits of womanly comportment, broaching subjects as relevant to Enlightenment discourse as universal toleration and

112 humanitarian assistance to all those in need. 12 Where, for example, Montesquieu' s

Roxane and the women of the harem despair of their situation, and can only envision

their own empowerment in ending their lives and therewith the male domination that

rules them, Beaumont's women take positive steps to change their environment, working

within the boundaries of acceptable societal constraints to educate both the men in their

lives and one another about the full potential available to them. The Lettre en reponse is a

vivid illustration of this argument, and its sequel, the Arrest Solomnel, demonstrates the

active way in which the narrator addresses a negative situation. Determined to have

Mother Nature- a ruling female presence- grant a reprieve from Abbe Coyer's predicted

metamorphosis of men and women, the narrator prepares a petition calling for such a change to be halted. Conscious that an action needs implementation and seeing no one else step forward, Beaumont's heroines take on the task. Unlike their fictional predecessors, who were constrained to focus their attention on the needs of their men and their families, Beaumont's women are oriented outward, capable of effecting change outside the limits of the family circle and actively involved in its execution. This notion of "change through action," an all-important aspect of Beaumont's work, is a recurring refrain in the author's address to her female readers. By demonstrating through her heroines the strategies that can lead to such change, Beaumont illustrates the potential of

such an approach to overcome adversity at any level, with much general good being achieved as a result of such action. Amplifying the introduction of an idea, Beaumont's texts provide the stimulation for positive reflection coupled with the means of translating that new moral imperative into a physical response or a material result.

113 A comparison between Beaumont and her contemporary Madeleine de Puisieux provides a striking ideological contrast. Puisieux is definitely interested in surrounding herself with new ideas, and she is extremely outspoken about the prejudice of men against women and their capabilities. "Les hommes ont si mauvaise opinion des femmes qu'ils nous font des Livres a part, des methodes particulieres comme on fait aux Enfans, des Cathechismes a leur portee" (Men have such a poor opinion of women that they make separate books for us, special techniques as one does for children, catechisms just for them; Les Caracteres, II: 225-6). We know that her works addressed many issues of significance for women, including the education of girls.

Unlike Beaumont, however, Puisieux does not accept the idea that individuals determine their destiny, and she insists that "toute la bonne conduite imaginable ne donne pas le bonheur" (all the best behavior imaginable does not bring happiness; II: 227).

Instead, she argues that a combination of events can control us, completely random and unpredictable. It is this arbitrary fate that has made her a woman, a condition that

Puisieux dislikes: "Je suis femme, et fachee de l'etre comme toutes les autres" (I am a woman, and angry to be so, like all the others; II: 235). Yet she bends to the "bienseance" of her period and, more significantly, to the restrictions propriety places on women's behavior. She leaves intellectual questioning to the philosophes, suggests that the aristocrats should be responsible for producing "les Heros," and writes that the middle class should produce "les gens de Lettres et les Savants" (the literati and the intellectuals;

II: 211 ). Though she is unhappy with her feminine condition, she appears unwilling to push for the kind of change that others of her gender were demanding.

114 Alice Laborde describes Puisieux as encouraging positive attitudes in others, expressing "une sorted' optimisme heureux" (a kind of happy optimism; 40). Her brand of hopefulness is also personalized, as we have seen in Beaumont, focusing on individual happiness that can only be found within oneself, such that each individual creates his or her own satisfaction. However, Puisieux is concerned with self-knowledge and self­ fulfillment achieved by recognizing and accepting one's place in life, and draws parallels with an earlier intellectual. "Je suisun peu de l'avis de Montaigne, et pourvu que les gens soient propres ace qu'ils font" (I am somewhat of Montaigne's opinion, and allow that people should be suited to what they do; II: 210). She posits that only when an individual accepts his or her function in society and its social condition can that individual achieve happiness. This is because he or she has also accepted the limits of individual potential for growth or advancement imposed by that social condition, and is thereby freed from worrying about how to overcome those limits. Contrary to Beaumont, Puisieux conveys a sense of inevitability imposed by the environment even as she criticizes it, for she offers little in the way of models for change, but only proposes this personalized coping strategy.

Another contemporary of Beaumont's to whom she is often compared is Sarah

Fielding, whose novels David Simple (1744) and The Governess (1749) Beaumont read in London during her years of residence there. The links between their pedagogical methodologies are significant (and will be explored in the following chapter), as is their acceptance of the patriarchal system and all that it implies. Fielding's characters in The

Governess are adolescent females under the guidance of their tutor, the splendidly named

115 Mrs. Teachum. Early in the text, Miss Jenny Peace, the oldest girl, tells the others about her formative years with her family. Describing her relationship with her mother and her brother, she reports in a matter-of-fact way that he "went to School" while she stayed at home (17), this brother whose mother had "endeavored to educate in such a manner, that

I hope he will be a Father to you, if you deserve his Love and Protection" (20-1). Jenny recounts in the first sentence of her story that their father had died when she was "but half a year old" (16). This event, given its placement at the opening of this fictional autobiography, indicates the significance that male authority- or its absence- had in the lives of women and children during this period. Yet as in Beaumont's texts, Fielding's women give the appearance of dependence on the male figures for protection and guidance, when in fact their actions in the texts demonstrate a strong sense of personal responsibility and independence. It is Jenny who provides an example of patience to the younger girls, teaching them that honesty leads to better human relationships, as does virtuous behavior, tolerance, friendship, and kindness.

The most famous of Beaumont's contemporaries in the field of pedagogy is Jean­

Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Although they have much instructional methodology in common, their positions on women are an integral part of the way in which their strategies for human behavior are shaped, and explain the most profound differences in their approaches to instruction. In his introduction to Rousseau's Emile ( 17 62 ), Pierre

Burgelin compares the role of Sophie to that of Fenelon's Telemaque (1695) as an indication of the change that Rousseau proposes in the male-female relationship. Where

Telemaque discovers passion in one woman - the nymph Eucharis - and must tum to a

116 second woman to experience a wiser, more cerebral love (Burgelin uses the adjective

"sage"), Rousseau combines those characteristics in his Sophie, who "doit unir les deux fonctions: on l'instruit pour la seduction et la vie menagere" (must unite both functions: she is trained for seduction and housekeeping; 46). According to Burgelin, Rousseau's approach represents an important move forward by breaking tradition and recognizing the ability of women to combine body and mind in the same person (46-7). However,

Rousseau positions woman in this broadened role not to satisfy her need for fulfillment, but instead to better serve the needs of men who can now expect physical and psychological support from the same woman. Even with this newly found diversity attributed to her, this woman's place is still maintained in the home, serving the needs of her husband to help him become the best person he can. Such changes still put women's destiny in the hands of men who retain responsibility for her instruction. Nowhere is this expanded potential seen to release this woman to have her own needs or desires met, or her own plans or goals achieved beyond those limits determined by her husband.

Rousseau's conventionally superior attitude toward women was noted by his male contemporary Frederic Melchior Grimm, who reprimanded him for it. When Rousseau, in his Discours sur l'origine de l'inegalite (1755), writes that love is an institution created by women to establish dominance over the men whom they should be obeying, Grimm candidly points out that "c'est ala mode de dire du mal des femmes" (it is fashionable to speak badly of women) and "Quels raisonnements! Comme si l'on avait des droits dans la nature jusqu'a proportion de ses forces!" (What reasoning! As if one had rights in nature proportionate with one's strength!), adding that "cette maniere de philosopher ne peut

117 convenir qu'a des etres imbeciles, inferieures meme aux betes" (this type of

philosophizing is suitable only for imbeciles, even lower than animals; Correspondence

Litteraire III, 15 June 1756, cited in Schwartz, 237-8). Grimm notes that the flaws of

women that Rousseau so easily cites are the result of man's unjust and repressive conditions imposed on them, an argument he might have encountered eight years earlier

in Beaumont's Lettre en reponse.

Beaumont diverges from Rousseau in placing her women on equal footing with her men, sharing ideas and ideals, encouraging one another, and reaching beyond their

domestic sphere. While Beaumont's characters repeatedly enforce the Biblical position that wives should encourage the moral rectitude of their husbands, once that is achieved -

as in the case of the Marquis de *** (Lettres de Madame du Montier) or LeBaron d' Astie (La Nouvelle Clarice)- the wife is free to pursue her own objectives and is often encouraged and supported by her husband. In addition, Beaumont does not hesitate to have other female protagonists step in where necessary to take on the tasks left undone by those husbands and their counterparts. Appeals to sisters, mothers, fellow students, even

Mother Nature herself, are extremely common throughout Beaumont's works, confirming the importance of mentoring between women while reinforcing their general capacities for planning, organization, and civil and domestic tasks (see the discussion of social concerns in chapter 4 below). Those appeals occur in a variety of formats, each of which entails obvious as well as inferred meanings in the text.

As a woman of the Enlightenment, Beaumont recognized that language is an important vehicle for expressing the general condition of women in the public and the

118 private sectors of eighteenth-century Europe. Beaumont's use of the term "le Sexe" to

designate women is indicative of the code then used to differentiate gender and to

reinforce stereotypes. Graffigny's Lettres d'une Peruvienne offers an example of such a

code as utilized by a woman. In that novel, much of the plot centers on the heroine Zilia,

her initial use of the ancient South American written form of quipos, 13 and her

progressive acquisition of the French language. Early in Zilia's transition process,

Graffigny depicts her repeating the words spoken to her by the French protagonist

Deterville without understanding their meaning. Cave suggests that the interest

of Graffigny's story demands a certain tension in which "this focus of interest depends

first on a psychology in which conscious intention is always undermined by hidden or

unconscious motive" (155). Such a layered analysis is what Mesch sees in the Zilia­

Deterville language lesson, and she suggests that what appears to be a well-intentioned

effort by the protagonist to assist the Peruvian woman is actually hiding a more subtle

motive. Mesch argues that this scene implies feminist connotations that challenge the

dominant tradition in eighteenth-century France under which "the man dictate[s] and the

woman repeat[s]" (6), and as such is an obvious cultural critique for reader interpretation.

In the same way, this conscious versus unconscious motive is present in the

actions of Beaumont's female mentors, who reject the memorized phrases of their

students if they are not accompanied by a clear appreciation of their meaning. Students in the Magasin des enfants are repeatedly invited to expand upon the lessons they recite,

and to adapt them to their own lives. This is clear in the discussion in which Miss Bonne encourages Lady Sensee to share what she has learned from her governess about

119 interpreting a story: "Vous m'avez dit qu'il fallait examiner les sottises et les vertus de ceux dont on apprend les histoires; afin de ne pas faire les memes fautes et de pratiquer leurs vertus" (you told me that one must evaluate the foolishness and the virtues of those who teach us stories so that we do not make the same mistakes and practice their virtues;

44). This process of questioning meaning is then reinforced when several of the other

.girls share their individual - and differing - thoughts on the passage being studied. The emphasis placed on individual thought, reflection, and understanding of concepts as basic as honesty and as complex as individual social responsibility, are not simply introduced by Beaumont's characters, they are explored as ideas to be questioned, contemplated, and selected for their merit as they do later in this same text:

Miss Bonne: Eh bien, Miss Molly, quel profit voulez-vous tirer de cette

histoire?

Miss Molly: Quandj'aurai fait une faute,je ne m'en excuserai pas, etj'en

demanderai pardon.

Miss Bonne: C' est tres bien repondre. Et vous Lady Charlotte ?

Lady Charlotte: Quandj'aurai envie d'etre gourmande, ou desobeissante,

je penserai que le serpent est a cote de moi, qu'il me conseille ces choses,

et je lui dirai, va-t -en mechant, j 'aime mieux obeir au bon Dieu qu' a toi.

Miss Bonne: ... et Lady Spirituelle, que pense-t-elle ?

Lady Spirituelle: Je pense qu'Eve etait bien orgueilleuse de vouloir etre

aussi savante que Dieu. Je pense aussi qu'elle etait bien gourmande; si elle

n'avait rien eu a manger, je lui aurais pardonne. (56-7)

120 Miss Bonne: So, Miss Molly, what benefit do you want to take from this

story?

Miss Molly: When I will have made a mistake, I will not make excuses, et

I will ask for forgiveness.

Miss Bonne: Very well answered. And you, Lady Charlotte?

Lay Charlotte: When I want to overindulge or be disobedient, I will

imagine that the snake is next to me, that he is giving me advice, and I will

tell him- go away, evil one, I would rather obey God than you.

Miss Bonne: ... and Lady Spiritual, what does she think?

Lady Spiritual: I think that Eve was very proud to want to be as

knowledgeable as God. I also think that she was very greedy; if she did

not have anything to eat, I would have forgiven her.

Beaumont empowers her readers through the actions of her protagonists, who

demonstrate overtly the means for formulating an analysis of information, while also imparting to women readers the unconscious notion that deviation from the same tradition of mindless repetition and memorization that Zilia embodies in the above example is possible and, in fact, preferable.

Beaumont controls the impact of her texts on the reader's reflection through another verbal strategy. Interspersing real-life, verifiable individuals in her fictional texts

serves several important purposes for the author. The autobiographical side of such a practice is evident, as in the case of the Lettres de Madame du Montier, where the daughter of Duke Leopold and granddaughter of Louis XIV, Beaumont's charge in

121 Luneville, is portrayed. When Beaumont's fictional heroine and her husband are called to

the court of the King of Sardinia, they also encounter his new wife, "la princesse de

Lorraine, aujourd'hui Reine de Sardaigne," who is further described as "grande et bien

faite; sans etre belle elle est extremement aimable" (the princess of Lorraine, today

Queen of Sardinia ... tall and well built; without being beautiful she is extremely likable;

44), an admiring portrait of the real Elisabeth Theresa. This type of characterization is

also present in the Magasins, where Beaumont herself informs her readers that the young

women are based on actual profiles of her students. In the dedication and the introduction

of the Magasin des adolescentes, Beaumont writes that her students provide a basis for

her characters which, she explains, "vous excitera a faire vos efforts pour devenir ce que

vous n'etes pas" (will encourage you to make the effort to become that which you are

not; Dedication). Birgitta Berglund-Nilsson addresses the autobiographical nature of this

technique in her discussion of Civan, adducing Beaumont's conditions for taking charge

of four-year old Sophie Carteret in her own life as the basis for the scenario that the

author later created for the young prince Civan and his tutor Dulica (Berglund-Nillson

21). Yet such speculation unjustly discounts Beaumont's literary purpose and methods,

inferring a desire for self-insertion into the texts rather than a strategy of ratifying her

fictions, and indirectly her pedagogical methods, by sewing them with historical references and figures already familiar to her readers.

For example, Montesquieu had taken his Persians to historically accurate sites in

Paris in the Lettres Persanes (1721), where they visited such actual monuments as Notre

Dame (120) and frequented such familiar establishments as the Academie Fran<;_:aise

122 (146). Similarly, Marivaux's young hero and his mistress take the reader through the

streets of Paris in La Vie de Marianne (1731), noting well-known landmarks as they move from the convent to the country. Across the Channel, Jonathan Swift used the

familiar settings of England to introduce his fantasy Gulliver's Travels (1726). In the first two lines of the novel, the narrator tells of his father's "small Estate in Nottinghamshire"

and his being sent to school at Emmanuel-College in Cambridge (3). Throughout his travels in the imaginary lands, he references such familiar individuals from his life as

Herman Moll, a well-known Dutch mapmaker residing in London (249).

Among women's texts, Mme de Lafayette's Princesse de Cleves also provides an historically accurate setting in a preceding century and an array of well-known historical figures. Intrigues about the lives of such famous royals as Mary Stuart, Diane de Poitiers,

Henry II, and Catherine de Medici, thicken the political themes and intensify the involvement of the reader in the otherwise fictional plot. They also lend a sense of documentary accuracy to the text, and its knowledge of the world, power, and authority.

Beaumont applies this same realistic mode or technique in Lettres de Madame Du

Montier, and more fully in the novel Civan. There the fictional travelers, led by the resolute Dulica, find themselves in the court of Fran<;ois I, discussing the situation in

England under Henry VIII, and in Civan's homeland of Japan, for which Beaumont provides the reader with accurate details of history and its sixteenth-century political structure. 14 Through such texts, Beaumont accomplishes the dual objective of providing her readers with information to expand their general knowledge while lending weight to the perhaps utopic ideals that she herself weaves into the story lines themselves.

123 There is also, however, a personal note in this increasing authorial self­

confidence. Confronted with the dual standard for male and female authors that is known

to have existed in the publishing world, Beaumont draws on her own sense of personal

value to retort with unambiguous authority. Joan Hinde Stewart describes the period's

male publishers as predominantly treating female authors with disrespect in all areas of

business: publication, payment, and promotion. Such behavior, Stewart explains, is often

mentioned in the women authors' letters which "testify to the obstacles they encountered

in bucking the literary establishment and tight-fisted publishers" ("The Novelists and

Their Fictions" 198). The troubles of Graffigny, Riccoboni, and Montolieu, discussed by

Stewart, reflect those that Beaumont debates with Tyrrell in their correspondence.

Although contracts between Beaumont and her longtime publisher John Nourse indicate

that she was compensated with above average sums, 15 she nonetheless took exception to

some of the demands that he placed on her later work. By 1768, Beaumont's letters

manifest such an authorial confidence that she stands up to Nourse when it comes to her

choice of topics and her fees. Ultimately, she turns from the London house to the

Lyonnais publisher Pruyset-Ponthus, who apparently respects her public fame as an

author and has no need to approve her writings or even sign a contract before agreeing to their publication (see the letters from Beaumont to Tyrell cited in Artigas-Menant,

Lumieres clandestines: les papiers de Thomas Pichon 299). Her residence in France may have played some role in this change of alliance, but there is no doubt that her ongoing

personal achievements as a female author of international renown strengthened considerably (and unusually) her negotiating position as a professional writer.

124 Of course, despite Beaumont's diligent work, designed in large part to inspire and encourage women to view their intellect and their spirit as assets, it is difficult to know how many women followed her recommendations. Numbers are difficult to estimate, but clearly many readers found the model too difficult or just not aligned with their interests.

Complaints from her women readers of the Nouveau magasin Franrois echoed those received years later in France by the editors of the Journal des Dames. As van Dijk points out, the matter of contents was an ongoing dilemma, and the most pressing question was: "de quoi doivent s'entretenir, ou doit-on entretenir, les femmes?" (with what should women entertain themselves or be entertained? 150). Beaumont treated this question with a simple response in her January 1751 issue of Le Nouveau magasin

Franrois, where she replied to a disgruntled woman reader that the pieces she included were within reach of all ladies whose spirit was even the least bit open ("Au Public").

Confident in the importance of her appeal to women, Beaumont eventually turned her focus to education as a more precise means of making her voice heard by that feminine audience. In the next chapter, we turn to the role of education in Beaumont's writings in order to demonstrate how she applied many of the literary strategies discussed here. Belief in women's intellectual potential would continue to condition her work, especially in her design of pedagogical strategies meant to encourage that potential in her students.

1 Beaumont is referring to the Treatise on Studies (1726-31), Ancient History (1730-38) and Roman History

(1741), pedagogical texts written by Charles Rollin (1661-1741). A historian and educator, Rollin wrote of the importance of studying history, and of having textbooks written in language that could be understood

125 by the reader. Though an exceptional intellectual, his controversial and highly public Jansenist beliefs kept him from much of the recognition he deserved, including entry into the Academie Fran~aise.

2 This comment also confirms Bloch's limited familiarity with Beaumont. Although Clancy refers to an

~nnulment from her first husband, Antoine Grimard de Beaumont, the majority of her biographers refer to the lack of documentation on this fact and even on the number of marriages that she may have had (see

Roubain 28-30, and especially Artigas-Menant in "Femmes des lumieres: les lumieres de Marie Leprince de Beaumont: nouvelles donnees biographiques.").

3 Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crebillon (1707-1777) was known as Crebillon fils to distinguish him from his famous father, a dramatist, author, and member of the Academie Fran~aise. The son was known for his licentious topics and his satirical style of writing, particularly directed at women, religion, and politics. His most famous works were Les Egarements du Cr£ur et de l 'esprit ou Memoires de M. De Meilcour (1736-8) and The Sofa (1742).

4 There is some sense of confusion in this reference, since Diderot had published Les Bijoux indiscrets in

1748, or two years before this article appeared.

5 Her brother, Jean-Baptiste Le Prince (1734-1781), was employed at the court of Catherine the Great in St.

Petersburg as an artist from 1758 until his return to Paris in 1763.

6 Suzanna van Dijk, in her excellent study of women journalists in Enlightenment France, finds only eighteen women engaged in journalistic activities. In her discussion of the three women who worked for the

French Journal des Dames, she notes none of them had actually created a journal as had Beaumont.

However, the latter did so in England, excluding her from van Dijk's analysis focused on women's journals and their reception in France itself.

7 This disguise is also pointed out by Berglund-Nillson as a modeling by Beaumont of Fenelon's

Tetemaque, in which the young son of Ulysses is under the guidance of Mentor, the goddess Minerva disguised as a man. What is of note here is that Dulica never appears as anything other than a woman to her students.

126 8 See chapter 3 for a more detailed discussion of the structure of Asor and Dulica's plan for Civan and

Mera's education.

9 Beaumont details this advice as stemming from Woolsey's unbridled ambition to become head of the

Church. When his own objectives are denied, he then pushes Henry, weakened by his passion for Anne

Boleyn, to divorce his wife Catherine and thus divorce himself from the Church in Rome.

10 In this tale, Aurora is sent to a distant land by her vain mother who does not want her adolescent daughter's presence to seem to age her. Under the protection of a shepherdess/fairy, Aurora learns the joy that "la priere, la lecture, le travail, et la promenade" (prayer, reading, work, and long walks; II: 329) can bring to a bored young lady whose city experience consisted primarily of styling her hair and gossiping with girlfriends.

11 Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes ends with the last letter received in Paris by the protagonist Usbek, sent by his favorite wife Roxane. In it she announces her adultery and impending suicide, the result of a life that she sees without any options for happiness.

12 See chapter 4 for a more detailed discussion of these topics.

13 For a detailed discussion about Graffigny's use ofthis ancient Aztec writing style comprising knotted ropes, see Lorraine Piroux, "The Poetics of Illegibility in French Enlightenment Book Culture."

14 In her introduction to a recent reprint of Civan, Alix DeGuise provides a thorough review of Beaumont's use of historical data on Japanese politics, land reform, religious missionaries, and general cultural attitudes as represented in the text (xiv-xxx).

15 John Feather provides details on the fees paid to many of Nourse's authors, and notes that "agreements for payment by the sheet are, however, exceptional; Nourse's normal form of contract was for a fee for a specified length of book. If the author exceeded that length he received no extra payment" (207). Beaumont was not only paid by the sheet, but she also received compensation in the form of book copies when her per sheet fee was a bit lower (209).

127 Chapter 3

Education: An Enlightened Alternative

Since women find the paths to fame and power

closed to members of their sex, they achieve

these goals via other routes, using their charms

as compensation.

Madame de Lambert, Oeuvres (1747)

By the time Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont arrived in England in 1748, she had been an educator for almost 25 years, first as a teacher in her last years at the convent school in Ernemont, and subsequently as a governess to the royal children at the court of

Luneville. Her experience most certainly positioned her well for employment with the aristocratic families of London, where the French language was highly regarded and a very desirable asset for their children. Beaumont references that elitist trend in her preface to the Education complete, bemoaning the priorities of parents who would choose a governess even if she were sorely lacking education, good manners and morals, or other important qualifications, where she quotes parents justifying their choice of an uneducated, untrained governess: "N'importe, elle parle fran<;ais" (It doesn't matter, she speaks French; 1: v). As a French woman with substantial credentials and evidence of

128 effective teaching results, Beaumont countered that trend and was soon a governess in demand with many of London's leading farnilies. 1

Education in the Eighteenth-Century

Beaumont's own education is a backdrop to her achievements as author and pedagogue. Although her mother provided her earliest education, she received most of her formal instruction in a religious setting in Normandy. This type of boarding school setting was a common one for aristocratic children, and yet, as her biographer Jean Marie

Roubain details, an exceptional situation for two adolescent girls from a less than affluent horne? Modern critic Sarnia Spenser categorizes this practice of early education at horne followed by convent training as one generally reserved for daughters of families ("Women and Education" 85). Motherless early in her adolescence, young

Jeanne Marie3 received the encouragement and support of Madame du Plessis, an energetic leader of Rouen's bourgeois society. When this dynamic woman and her associate Madame d' Arnbre founded their school for young girls in the convent at

Ernernont,4 a village outside the city of Rouen, Jeanne-Marie and her younger sister entered as students and ultimately became instructors themselves, remaining essential members of this school environment for a ten-year period (Robain, 19). With neither an aristocratic family nor a dowry of any consequence, the young Le Prince girls had little hope of marriage propositions and instead followed a track that in most cases would have led to a religious life within the orders of the convent.

Her educational training was significant for Beaumont at many levels. Many women writers in the French context encountered substantial obstacles to full participation in philosophical and scientific discussions of the day because of the

129 emphasis placed on scientific, philosophical, and political writing and women's relative lack of access to these areas (Bloch, "The Eighteenth Century" 84). Beaumont, with her ten years of apprenticeship and teaching in the convent school, was able to minimize this obstacle with an education advanced enough to allow her to interact with the intellectuals and philosophes of her day. Twentieth-century scholars of education highlight the variations in material taught to young girls who were privileged enough to receive a convent education that was dependent on the training of the nuns and the objectives of the school itself. Such historians of education as Paule Constant and Jean Queniart track a significant increase in the number of privileged girls attending these religious institutions beginning in the seventeenth century and multiplying in the eighteenth century. They also note a clear shift in attitudes at the end of the seventeenth century toward the education of those girls, who were slowly seen as needing to know more than just the difference between their husbands' shirts and vests- which Montaigne and Moliere had deemed sufficient.5 Jean Queniart, in his history of girls' education in early modern France, points to a growing recognition that a woman should have education enough to read, write, and do basic accounting functions. This training would allow them to be better companions to their husbands and provide their children with basic skills before their more structured education began under the auspices of a trained instructor, "des futures meres capables d'elever chretiennement leurs enfants" (future mothers able to raise their children in a

Christian way; 481). The recent anthology Le Patrimoine de ['education nationale

( 1999), compiled under the direction of Pierre Caspard, also illustrates this shift from one century to the next. Two works of art from the early seventeenth century are underscored with comments on a mother's responsibilities in educating her daughter. "Pour une fille,

130 savoir lire suffit, elle n' a pas besoin de recourir aux institutions scolaires" (For a girl, knowing how to read is sufficient. She does not need to attend educational institutions;

144). In later pages in this same anthology, the structured institutional program in place for the 250 young noblewomen boarded at Madame de Maintenon's famous Saint-Cyr school, around the tum of the century, is described. There the youngest girls started religious studies at age 7, added history, geography, and music at age 11, language, drawing, and dance at 14, and capped their studies with moral instruction at 17. All of this was, of course, accompanied by instruction in such household tasks as sewing and weaving (238-9). In fewer than one hundred years the role of women in the household was broadening, even if was still limited to those skills that could best enhance the expansion of domestic well-being.

Although Saint-Cyr was certainly a unique and exclusive school for girls, a similar program and objective are reiterated by Alice Laborde in her summary of

Madeleine Puisieux's education at the Port Royal school. "On n'apprit certes niles sciences ni les langues etrangeres a Madeleine d' Arsant ... Par contre elle lisait certainement le ... Elle ne re<;ut points de le<;ons de sciences naturelles ... Les mathematiques (arithmetique uniquement) n'etaient etudiees qu'une heure par semaine, le dimanche et les jours de fetes, a Port-Royal" (Madeleine d' Arsant surely was not taught either science or foreign languages ... On the other hand, she certainly read Latin

... She did not have lessons in the natural sciences ... Mathematics (arithmetic only) were only studied one hour a week, on Sundays and holidays, at Port-Royal; 6). Thus a shift may have begun, but its effect was not as widespread as modem day feminists might like to see. As Paule Constant summarizes: "Si la fille ne doit etre sotte, elle ne doit pas

131 pour autant en savoir trop" (Although girls should not be stupid, neither should they know too much; 319). In addition, the reality of such education, even in the broader scope of Enlightenment society, was essentially limited to aristocratic and upper bourgeois girls whose families could afford such attention.

It is difficult to ascertain the exact course of instruction at the Ernemont convent.

However, along with an emphasis on many of the most prominent religious guides of the day, it appears to have included much literature of the classic Greek tradition, following the ongoing interest in antiquity that had surged during the Renaissance and fueled the seventeenth-century debate known as the quarrel of Ancients and Moderns.6 Quenart writes that in eighteenth-century France, knowledge of Latin and the ability to quote classic texts of Antiquity were part of an educated man's "baggage" (25-6). In accord with that model, Beaumont easily cites the Greek Metamorphoses, Plato and Aristotle, and St. Augustine.7 She also weaves the ancient heroes into her stories and examples, and bases many of her pedagogical lessons on the cultural inheritance of such ancient societies as the Persians, Egyptians, and Carthaginians. Education complete (1753), published early in her teaching career as a handbook for parents and governesses, is replete with detailed histories of Darius, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar that speak to her level of comfort with these topics.

In addition to a teaching style advocating ancients as models and even, as we will see below, incorporating styles that mirror many of those utilized by philosophers, Beaumont's pedagogical models, particularly in the early Education complete and Magasin des enfants, are clearly influenced by the more contemporary models of Charles Rollin, Fran~ois Fenelon, and Fran~ois Poulain de la Barre, whose De

132 l 'Egalite des deux sexes ( 1693) was the inspiration of Madeleine de Puisieux. Of particular interest is Rollin, whose Traite des etudes Beaumont mentions in her preface to the Education complete. Rollin's text is referenced by Marcel Grandiere in his extensive historical L 'Ideal pedagogique en France au dix-huitieme siecle ( 1998) as one of the most influential pedagogical works of the early eighteenth century. This is largely attributed to Rollin's focus on the methodology of education rather than on its application for imparting Christian values, and also on Rollin's self-acknowledged influence by the writings of John Locke (57-60). Beaumont cites his work as a source for her own, and no doubt admires what Grandiere calls his "preoccupation" with "la marche a suivre dans les classes" (the process to follow in the classroom; 58), and his manner of educating students through "I' emulation et ... le respect des bonnes mreurs et l'amour de la religion" (emulation and ... the respect for good manners and the love of religion; 60).

Although she assuredly recognizes that his texts criticize women who study the more abstract subjects such as Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and philosophy (Queniart 480), her criticism of his work is leveled at the pedagogical flaws of his methodology, where she identifies an inability to appeal to various types of students.8 Grandiere divides education in France during that century into three general periods: 1714-17 46 when religious education dominates, and the category in which he places Rollin; 17 46-17 62 when secularism begins to take a prominent role; and finally 1762-1788, when new forms of pedagogy begin to enter educational institutions under the influence of Rousseau and

Beaumont, whom Grandiere cites in that third category. This placement highlights

Grandiere's accurate assessment that accords a classic structure to Rollin's work compared to the more innovative approach that he confers on Beaumont's pedagogy. In

133 this way Grandiere reflects Beaumont own respect for Rollin's formative work (she often

sends her students to study his book alongside hers for such specific historical topics as

9 the culture of the ancient Greek peoples. ) while recognizing the need for new primary texts that more closely capture the students' needs and interests.

The other dominant French voice in the eighteenth-century sphere of pedagogy was Fran~ois Fenelon ( 1651-1715), noted seventeenth-century theologian and philosopher. Preceptor to Louis XIV's grandchildren, and in particular to the dauphin,

Fenelon strove to provide his charges with an interesting classroom ambiance, and he composed stories, adapted fables, and created didactic dialogues to convey moral lessons

such as those appearing in his widely respected treatise on the education of girls, Traite de ['education desfilles (1687). Although it appears that his lessons lacked much of the intellectual content that Beaumont considered essential for the proper education of a ruler or aristocrat - natural sciences, physics, mathematics, modem languages - it is this mode of educating royalty through stories and dialogues that can be seen as an inspiration for some of Beaumont's classroom methodology. As she did with Rollin, Beaumont used

Fenelon's work as a model while criticizing, as a primary flaw in his work, his inability to appeal to his audience. Her own novel Civan was compared to Fenelon's Telemaque by one of her earliest modern critics, Fernand Baldensperger, and again more recently in the discussions of Civan by Deguise and Berglund-Nilsson. Although Beaumont respected the pious religious stance and dialogue format that characterizes Fenelon's teachings, she found his works too scholarly to be appealing to students, boring them rather than enticing them into reading. In her introduction to the Magasin des enfans

(1756), Beaumont writes, "Qu'onjuge par-la l'ennui que doivent donner aux pauvres

134 enfans, la lecture & la traduction de Telemaque & de Gil-blas, auxquels on borne d' ordinaire toutes leurs lectures dans les ecoles" ("Let us judge from this how boring for the poor students the reading and translation of Telemaque and Gil-blas must be, to which their reading is usually confined in the schools"; 1: iii). Beaumont thus extracts elements from her predecessors that she updates and contextualizes in her own system, which she adapts to the needs of her students.

What is so significant in such remarks is not merely Beaumont's exposure to such religious and historical texts written by the masters of antiquity and the most celebrated authors of her time, although clearly such an education is exceptional for an eighteenth­ century woman. Even more critical to her future as an educator and a moralist was the prior development of written systems of thought applied to education, systems that defined pedagogy as a logical progression of events comprised of organized methods addressing both the information to be taught and the manner in which that information was to be communicated. Although authors from the Greeks through the medieval and renaissance periods had also written on education and pedagogy (Christine de Pizan is a good example), the shift in attitudes toward education that took seventeenth-century texts addressing education and pedagogy into such institutions as the French convent school on a regular basis gave those texts acceptability and a more universal authority. For

Beaumont, who most likely encountered these texts during her years as student and instructor at Ememont, such awareness of this kind of pedagogical reflection in writing materials, part of what Peter Brooks refers to as "a new moralization of society's treatment of childhood" ( 6), might have prompted her to consider education as a distinct social science to be reflected upon, improved, and implemented to the best of her

135 potential. Her own work points to the legacy of such individual texts as those written by

Rollin, Fenelon, and others that preceded her demands for reform in French pedagogy and for its application to children of both sexes. Although part of an emerging group of women authors such as Puisieux and de Lambert, who were also independently addressing education in their writings in mid-century France, Beaumont's pedagogical handbooks and educational novels established her as what Samia Spencer called "a talented and innovative methodologist" (93) whose impact would be felt on students and teachers of her period and for generations to come.

The educational landscape that Beaumont encountered in mid-century England was quite different from the one that she had left behind in France. Although there was little standardization in the French system of education for girls, there were at least options for middle- and upper-class families through convent schools and private instruction. In addition, the salon atmosphere of Paris that extended into such aristocratic enclaves of rural France as the court in Luneville provided a venue for intellectual exchange that Beaumont certainly experienced in some aspect during her years of employment there. 10 In England, however, the power of the church was not nearly as significant as elsewhere in Europe, and, according to Carol Strauss Sotiropoulos, the religious schools so dominant in France had few equivalents in England (122). This more limited availability of schools (for children of either gender) and reduced institutional oversight during the early modern period resulted in a relatively random method of instruction- the "voluntary approach," as Deborah Simonton calls it (34)- in which education for girls, and in many cases for boys as well, was determined at the whim of parents or community leaders.

136 In Women in England 1500-1760 (1994), historian Anne Laurence briefly summarizes the educational process for girls as one whose primary mission was domestic aptitude, akin to the French model described above. Technical skills were taught to the poor and "polite accomplishments" to the , with no thought whatsoever of teaching serious subjects to any of these young girls. "Academic subjects- mathematics, and classical languages- were rarely taught in girls' schools. Those girls who did learn these things either were the daughters of learned men, usually clergymen, who were taught by their fathers, or had parents rich enough to employ a tutor, though often the tutor was chiefly there to teach the sons of the house" (170). Even the publication of such a detailed plan as Mary Astell's Serious Proposal to Ladies (1694) did little to change traditional opinions - or lack of opinions - on the type of curriculum that girls should be given and were capable of learning. In her discussion of women's education in England during the eighteenth century, Sotiropoulos comments on the radical nature of Astell's essay, on the importance of Descartes' separation of body and mind to Astell's arguments for girls' studies, and on the influence of Astell's text on such British women writers as

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1752) and Elizabeth Elstob (1683-1756). Yet such an advanced initiative for girls seems to have found little acceptance in the environment that Beaumont experienced during her early years in London, and Sotiropoulos notes that

"they [women writers] did not perceive their mission to speak as a group for improving national access to schooling for girls" (125). However, given the popularity of Astell's text and its distinct arguments, the education-minded Beaumont would surely have come into contact with it during her years in London, and may have even found in it some encouragement for her own strategies.

137 The most prominent influence in the field of pedagogy and one that Beaumont most certainly encountered in the discourse of educated Londoners was John Locke

(1632-1704), admired by many intellectuals throughout Europe and the Americas. His recent biographer W.M. Spellman describes Locke as:

A man who, rising above the pressing concerns of his own immediate

intellectual environment, magnified the power of human reason to an

unprecedented level, banished mystery and emotion from the realm of

mature discourse, and provided the foundation work for a new generation

eager to discard the regressive encumbrance of a theological world-view.

(4)

This is, in fact, a most interesting synopsis of the shift that Locke's theories promoted.

Locke founded his work in man's need to establish his relationship to God while eliminating the tradition of mystery and institutionalized religious doctrines that had until then served as a starting point for philosophical positing. It is the way in which that relationship is achieved that differentiates the theories of Locke, and that attracted the enthusiastic attention of so many subsequent generations of intellectuals. Voltaire, who dedicates the all-important thirteenth letter of his Lettres philosophiques (1733) to Locke, claimed that there had never been a wiser or more methodical spirit than Locke's, defending the Englishman as a philosopher who asked the questions necessary to the profound exploration of ideas (Lettres 88-95).

Locke's theory defined the human being as a "tabula rasa" or clean state at birth, arguing that the mind and soul were then shaped by the experiences that environment offered to the individual. In contrast to the Cartesian theory that separated the body from

138 the mind, an argument that such early modern feminists as Astell in England and even

Beaumont as noted above had found useful, Locke regarded the two parts as fundamentally entwined, so that the sensations of the body and the reflections of the mind act conjointly to create the entire self. Based on this theory, his treatise on education,

Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), emphasizes the importance of early education, asserting that "the little and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies have very important and lasting consequences" ( 10). This belief underlies

Locke's more detailed plan for the education of boys that would find its way into the proposals of such subsequent writers on education and morality as Sarah Fielding,

Rousseau, Maria and Richard Edgeworth, 11 and of course Beaumont.

Upon her arrival in London, Beaumont found employment rather quickly in the upper class household of Lady Pomfret, as noted above. Historians concur that this was arranged by the and Lady Oglethorpe, to whom Beaumont later dedicated the

Lettres diverses et critiques (1750), and that Beaumont became governess to Lady

Pomfret's five-year old granddaughter, Lady Sophia Carteret, a position she held for six years. During that time she published several books, and edited and published the monthly Nouveau magasin Fram;;ais. All of these publications were avenues for communicating her pedagogical philosophy, and also sources of promotion for both her own teaching skills and her forthcoming writings. In her modern introduction to the reprint of Beaumont's selected writings, Barbara Kaltz comments on the effectiveness of such a strategy at many levels. "Grace a cette strategie publicitaire et ala diffusion du

Nouveau magasinfram;;ois tant en Angleterre que sur le continent, Mme de Beaumont reussit a se batir une certaine reputation sur le plan international" (Thanks to this

139 publicity strategy and to the distribution of the Nouveau magas in franrois in England as well as on the continent, Mme de Beaumont succeeded in creating a certain reputation for herself at an international level; 18). The many "Avis de 1' Auteur" (Author's notice) that reference her experience and skill in teaching young ladies highlight the broad list of subjects that she teaches, 12 and indicate that she has "une methode facile pour retenir leurs lectures et en tirer du fruit" (an easy method for retaining their reading lessons and drawing some substance from them; Nouveau magasinfranr;ois, February 1751). Astute in promoting herself at all levels, Beaumont was also focusing more and more intensely on the issue of education, and making it a priority that would ultimately be her primary focus.

If her prospects for employment were favorable, Beaumont's opinion of the educational system that she encountered in Britain was less than complimentary. She commented on the lack of interest by parents in the education of their children, as on the antiquated methods of instruction being used, and she was most distressed about the lack of training and vocation exhibited by most teachers at all levels. These three factors would guide the majority of her pedagogical writings, and remain the most essential ingredients in her plan for improving education.

As noted in the introduction to this chapter, Beaumont observed an approach to education in many English families that favored appearance over substance, as in the snobbish appeal of speaking French, or the hiring of a French governess without credentials. Instead, Beaumont determined that an ability to connect with students' real interests was essential for students who were bored by books too complex or subjects taught by rote without attention to their relevance to the child. As for the profession itself,

140 Beaumont was adamant about the necessity of at least an aptitude for teaching. A discussion of each of her priorities is essential to understanding the full impact of

Beaumont's methodology.

In her efforts to improve the quality of education for children, Beaumont focused first on the parents, and on their expectations for their children as well as the instruction of those children. In fact, her Lettres diverses et critiques ( 17 50) - written and published in France- contains multiples letters with commentaries about the importance of education for sons and, in particular, for daughters. The first two letters, for example, are a fictional exchange between two men. In the first, a friend suggests to his correspondent that the education he is providing his daughter is a waste of time and money. The father responds with arguments to the contrary, demonstrating how each of the subjects she is studying will help his daughter become a better wife, mother, and person. Such conversations are interspersed throughout the text, demonstrating the importance of education and also its ultimate benefits as seen in the fictional letters of Beaumont's educated women writers. The final section, titled "Avis aux Parents et aux Maitres"

(Notice to Parents and Teachers), offers a general outline of the roles and responsibilities of adults in educating children of all ages.

Although the theme of education is broached throughout the monthly publications of the Nouveau magasin Fran~ois, it is the Education complete, au Abrege de l'histoire universelle (1753) that entails Beaumont's first authoritative handbook for parents and teachers. Her nineteen-page introduction outlines first the calamitous condition of

England's childhood education and its teachers, who represent nothing more than "la profession de tous ceux qui n'en ont point; la resource des autres a qui leur incapacite ne

141 permettait pas de penser a faire autre chose" (the profession of all those who do not have one; the recourse of others whose inability does not allow them to do anything else; 1: 1).

Following a series of examples that clarify this initial claim and its importance,

Beaumont moves from the negative to the positive, providing a list of the four criteria for a qualified instructor, followed by seven pages of detailed explanations that clearly identify the rationale for each, and its application:

1. Qu'il faut une vocation marquee pour elever Iajeunesse.

2. Qu'il faut un long apprentissage pour se mettre en etat d'y reussir.

3. Que c'est au defaut de ces talens qu'il faut attribuer la plus grande

partie des degouts qu'on eprouve en elevant Iajeunesse.

4. Que l'ouvrage principal des maitres est de rapporter ala culture des

mreurs, les parties de 1' education qui paraissent y a voir le moins de

rapport.

( 1. You must have a clear vocation to raise youth.

(2. You need a long apprenticeship to be in a position to succeed.

(3. It is to the lack of these skills that the greatest part of distaste for the

raising children can be attributed.

(4. The main task of teachers is to relate to the culture of manners those

parts of education that seem to have the least relationship with them. ;

1: 7-8.

The notions of vocation, apprenticeship, and even the pleasure of educating are evident to modern readers for whom these concepts are today an essential part of pedagogical training. Indeed, her fourth point is essentially the art of behavior, which Beaumont

142 describes as a gentle process of shaping the student's character so that she wants to learn, and learning becomes an easier process.

This last point is easily misinterpreted, as occurs when historian Jill Shefrin surprisingly equates Beaumont's stress on manners with neglect of intellectual stimulation. Writing about the educator William Gilpin, headmaster of Cheam school for boys in Surrey from 1752 to 1777, Shefrin asserts that "like Mme de Beaumont, Gilpin was more concerned with 'the formation of manners' than with 'the information of the mind'" (20). As Beaumont's list above and all of her other texts repeatedly confirm, manners were rather a means to improving education than an objective in itself. 13

This idea of instilling manners in children as a means of facilitating learning is one that recalls the salons of early modern France. The style of interaction that the texts utilize - dialogues, questioning to encourage reflection, even the confession of past errors and of how they were corrected - all evoke a dialogic atmosphere reminiscent of those public/private gatherings taking place in the salonniere's home but assembling participants from outside the family. As discussed in chapter 1, the salons were justified by a patriarchal society as a means of teaching civil behavior to aristocratic but unruly men, something that was seen as best achieved by women. Yet these salonnieres were educated and interested women whose objective was implicitly to direct the conversation of their guests to elicit the highest quality of intellectual discourse. In Beaumont's fictional classrooms, the "salonnieres" are now the governesses, and they guide the discussion to allow those in attendance to develop their own ideas and opinions in a way that promotes learning through gentle attention and humble example. Often this guide will share a fictional story, a practice also reminiscent of the salon in which authors

143 presented their latest works for general comment and review. This is the case most notably in the Magasins, in which such tales as "Beauty and the Beast" are told to the students as a reward for good behavior. Certainly Beaumont's objective was not to recreate a salon in the traditional French style with her students, although the final series of the Magasins often closely resembles the spirit of those salons, as suggested in the subtitle: the Instructions pour les jeunes dames qui entrent dans le monde, se marient, leurs devoirs dans cet etat, envers leurs enfants, pour faire suite au magasin des adolescentes (Journal for young ladies who are entering the world and marrying, their duties in that status, toward their children, as a follow up to the journal for young girls;

1764). Clearly the mentoring and exchange that made salons such an important venue for women seeking intellectual stimulation under the guise of feminine nurturing were also defining factors in Beaumont's gathering of young female students led by female mentors.

Jean Marie Roubain, author of an early Beaumont biography, comments on the importance of the teacher-student relationship for the eighteenth-century educator. In addition to describing her particular methods of instruction, Roubain writes of the teaching atmosphere that Beaumont encouraged, where "une confiance absolue doit regner entre l'eleve et la maltresse" (absolute confidence must reign between the student and the school mistress; 40). This is one of the implicit messages that pervade her manuals, her novels, and her short stories. Children must learn by example, and virtuous adults - including parents - respected by children are the best source of those examples.

This contrasts markedly with the traditional perspective of seventeenth and eighteenth­ century parents whose interest in their children's education was as diffident as their

144 desire to spend time in their company. Lady Charlotte Finch, one of Beaumont's students and a future governess to George III, decried this approach of relegating parental duties.

Rather, Jill Shefrin highlights the practices that both Beaumont and Lady Charlotte introduced in the mid 1750s, influenced by the writings of Locke on education and encouraged by more open attitudes toward childhood education. "Mme de Beaumont was passionately interested in the theory and practice of education, and extremely critical of the ignorance of many governesses and teachers" (Shefrin 74). Obviously Beaumont cannot condone the dereliction of duties both in parental behavior and the instructional competencies that she considers critical to the future of the family and, indeed, to any nation desirous of improving the condition of its people.

In fact, Beaumont was extremely troubled at the inadequate or non-existent training available to aspiring governesses in England as she familiarized herself with that country's educational system in the late 1740s and early 1750s. Modern historian Phyllis

Stock documents the paucity of female teachers in the charity schools that operated under the auspices of several religious denominations in the early part of the eighteenth century, and indicates that, where they were hired, unlike their male counterparts, they did not have to know writing and arithmetic. Consequently, they were paid half the salaries of male teachers (71-72). Beaumont herself refers repeatedly to both the importance of training and the ongoing absence of it in the background of most tutors, governesses, and others charged with the instruction of children. Beaumont's near obsession with the creation of a school for governesses in London is documented by several of her biographers, and Shefrin and Roubain refer to the efforts she made to begin such a school. Roubain explains the failure of the project in 1753 due to the lack of a locale for

145 housing the twenty-five trainees that Beaumont proposed to train (40), but Shefrin points to references confirming the existence of a school that operated in England from 1758 to

1762, and describes her "proposal for a school for governesses [as] one manifestation of her passionate commitment to the improvement of education" (74-6).

Beaumont's concern runs throughout her texts, from the strident plan she outlines above to the ongoing references in her other handbooks and even her fiction. In Civan, the narrator underscores her concerns about finding qualified teachers in an aside to the readers: "Legrand article n'est pas de trouver des enfants capables de I' education que je propose; le plus difficile est de deterrer des ma.Itres capables de la leur donner" (the great issue is not to find children capable of the education that I suggest; the difficulty is to unearth teachers capable of giving it to them; 1: 83). Twenty years later, Beaumont's fictional heroine Clarice writes to her cousin as she develops her plan for improving life in the French countryside: "Si vous ne formez pas des personnes capables de soutenir ce bien apres vous, la cupidite, I' interet particulier, viendront bientot a bout dele detruire; & dans cent ans on n' en appercevroit pas vestige" (if you do not train people capable of sustaining this good work after you, greed or personal interest will soon aim to destroy it; and in one hundred years there will be no trace of it; Clarice 2: 224 ). This theme of preparing teachers to teach in a systematic, ongoing program is one that would remain with Beaumont throughout her life as an educator and an author.

Beaumont is not alone in her emphasis on teacher training, nor was she the first to make a case for the importance of the educator in the process. Locke wrote in his earliest works about the importance of parental oversight on the education of children. Chapter

VI of the Second Treatise (1689), entitled "Of Paternal Power," addresses the important

146 roles of both parents in the education of their children: "To inform the mind, and govern the actions of their yet ignorant nonage, till reason shall take its place, and ease them of that trouble, is what the children want, and the parents are bound to" (124; par.58). As

Beaumont also observed to her readers, Locke wrote of his astonishment that parents were more concerned with the appearance of subjects in a school's syllabus than on the actual benefit of those studies on their children's development, although his reference was to a predilection for Greek and Latin over moral behavior while Beaumont found the mystique of French language over content reprehensible. 14 Such commentary exemplified

Locke's stance on the importance of close student-teacher relationships that he extolled, in which he "turned to the tutorial model as the ideal educational arrangement" (Spellman

90) and promoted his preference for parental·instruction or private tutoring over public schooling or group instruction.

Beaumont found a model for her aristocratic tutor in the writings of Fenelon, whose novel Les Aventures de Telemaque (1699) provided much of the structure for her own Civan. Both texts are intended for the education of royalty15 and the protagonist in each is the heir to the throne (although Civan is unaware of his origins until age seven).

Yet as important as the student might seem, it is the master and the lessons that are of primary significance in both texts. Fenelon writes the story of Telemaque and the search for his father Ulysses, who is wandering the Mediterranean Sea after his victory in Troy.

The chief relationship in the text, however, is the one established between the young hero and his guide Mentor, whom we are told in the first pages of the story is the goddess

Minerva in disguise. For critic modem Jacques LeBrun, the relationship between Mentor and Telemaque represents a divine or sacred paternal rapport, concerned with the

147 transmission of spirituality, grace, and the notion of selfless love (Preface 12-13). Yet nowhere in his introduction does LeBrun address the complex representation of this tutor to the prince who is a woman, albeit a goddess disguised as a human man. Although the modern critic Berglund-Nilsson touches on this point, it is without sufficient emphasis on the significance of Beaumont's modification of this gender role, thus overlooking the equality that Beaumont gives to women mentors (21-2). Beaumont's version of Fenelon's

Mentor, Dulica travels to Japan in disguise for reasons of safety (she is, after all, a seventeenth-century European woman traveling the world alone), but in her tutor's role to the royal student Civan, this mentor never disguises her gender or her qualifications under male garb. This gender represents an important shift from Fenelon's original model, where, Berglund-Nilsson notes, "comme mentor d'un futur roi, le lecteur s'attend a voir un homme" (as tutor to a future king, the reader expects to see a man; 22), asserting the belief that a young man's education - and in this case, a young dauphin's education- can only be adequately conducted to its full potential by a male tutor.

Eight years after the publication of Civan, Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his celebrated novel Julie ou la nouvelle Heloise ( 1761 ), followed by his treatise on education, Emile (1762). One of the key arguments for Rousseau's pedagogical thesis was also the need to provide students with competent instructors. Explaining to his readers the originality of his work ("Mon sujet etoit tout neuf apres le livre de Locke" I my subject was completely new after Locke's book; Emile l: 77), he emphasizes methodology, placing the importance of a good education after task of forming of better men (''I' art de former des hommes," 77). Analyzing childhood, observing students to better understand them ("Commencez done par mieux etudier vos eleves, car tres-

148 assurement, vous ne les connoissez point" I so begin by better studying your students, for most assuredly you do not know them at all; 78), and applying more positive attitudes in one's methods of presenting information ("que ce qu' il y a de bon so it dans la nature des choses" I let that which is good be in the nature of things; 79) will, he suggests, result in happier, more moral adults.

Book I of Emile details the role of the parents in educating their children, from the mother's duty to breastfeed her child to the father's obligation to raise moral and social adults who are responsible citizens (98). However, Rousseau determines the actual educating of the child to be the responsibility of the father, for no one else is as capable of fulfilling the role as well. In fact, an outsider would have to be superhuman, for nothing else would do: "en verite, pour faire un homme, il faut etre ou pere ou plus qu'homme soi-meme. Voila la fonction que vous confiez tranquillement a des mercenaires" (the truth is that, to make a man, you must be either a father or a super man.

That is the function that you confide so calmly to mercenaries; 99). Of course, the narrator of Emile takes on that very role of superhuman or "plus qu'homme" for himself, becoming the tutor for the fictional Emile. Like Locke and Beaumont before him,

Rousseau is outraged at the laxity of parents in selecting educators for their children.

Unlike his predecessors, though, he sees no place for a woman in the role of tutor, and, as discussed below, promotes a very different educational directive for girls.

Rousseau also sees the period before the age of twelve as a time of imitation on the part of the student, since he is still too young to have attained any level of reason.

Thus he admonishes teachers to set an example for their youngest students as the best way to provide them with good habits. "Maitres, laissez les simagrees, soyez vertueux et

149 bons; que vos exemples se gravent dans la memoire de vos Eleves, en attendant qu'ils puissant entrer dans leurs creurs" (teachers, set aside play acting and be virtuous and good, so that your examples are engraved in the memory of your students, until the time that those can enter into their hearts; 175). Here again he repeats the positions of Locke and Beaumont, both of whom stress the formation of competent instructors able to guide their charges and provide them with a moral, virtuous example of how to live their lives.

Beaumont's Objectives and Methodology

Beaumont centered her methodology on several basic principles. Believing that personalized attention would more effectively reach the minds of students, Beaumont engaged her students with dialogue that highlighted their individuality and accentuated their ability to use reason in the learning process. As Patricia Clancy describes it, "well before Rousseau, she adapts education to the child and not the child to education" ("Mme

Leprince de Beaumont: Founder of Children's Literature in France" 283). She filled her texts - both fictional and methodological - with lessons that were appealing and stimulating in order to encourage ongoing intellectual discovery. However, in

Beaumont's judgment each stage of learning required its own set of guidelines, and so she directed her texts to particular age groups, sorting them by the material they contained. Her methods addressed the complete student, so that intellectual learning was supplemented with physical skills that promoted good health and a strong awareness of the natural world. In addition, conscious of the neglected state of education for girls resulting from a patriarchal belief in limited female intellectual capacity, Beaumont oriented her instruction to engage members of her sex, demonstrating their potential to

150 accept more challenging roles and responsibilities in their own lives and in the world around them.

All of these priorities had one overriding pedagogical goal: to teach her students to think. Beaumont felt that children should be taught to question what they hear, reflect on information received through observation and personal investigation, and then develop their own reasonable conclusions that would be incorporated into their lifestyles. In fact, the title of the Magasin des enfants expressly states that objective, describing the journals as a place "dans lesquels on fait penser, parler, agir les jeunes Gens suivant le genie, le temperament, & les inclinations d'un chacun" (in which young people are made to think, speak, act according to each one's temperament and inclination). This well articulated methodology- in particular the "agir" or "action" mandate- and the positive outcomes of their application fill every genre of her writings. Anxious to share her improved methodologies that resulted in eager, well informed, and successful students, Beaumont wrote of the same type of learning methods that appealed to her students, so that they could serve other students, educators, and parents in their own pedagogical activities.

The Magasins each contain collections of short tales, such as "Beauty and the

Beast" ("La Belle et la bete"), "Bellote et Laidronette," and "Prince Darling," ("Le Prince

Cheri") contained in the Magasin des enfants. Each tale was designed to provide young readers with captivating topics, appropriate language, and clear moral lessons. Beaumont emphasized this intent in the introduction to the first volume of Magasin des Enfants, where she explained that an earlier draft of that volume had been well received by both the students who read it and the adult readers who had already been shaped by a different style of education ("les personnes faites"). Both ages preferred it to the boring, overly

151 complex, and ideologically dangerous texts they were used to (iii-iv). In this way,

Beaumont assured her audience of tutors and students that they would find the material engaging and valuable, since it had already been tested and found quite acceptable.

The series of Magasins - pedagogical handbooks in fact - were designed for three different age groups: Magasin des enfants,(l756) for the youngest schoolgirls, Magasin des adolescentes ( 1760) for adolescent girls from fifteen to eighteen years old, 16 and

Instructions pour les jeunes dames (1764) for young women. Similar to Locke's recommendations in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Beaumont's works propose specific guidelines for instructional practices based on age, personality, and social standing within the community, useful for both teacher and pupil. Translations of Locke's important Some Thoughts Concerning Education appeared in French almost concurrently with its publication and subsequent editions, 17 so it would not have been difficult for

Beaumont to use Locke's work to support her own positions on individualized relevant instruction for students, on the differing requirements for education based on age, and on the need for physical as well as mental instruction as part of a complete pedagogical plan.

However, where Locke wrote a treatise exploring these topics, Beaumont proposed a well-articulated method of interactive implementation, staged in multiple volumes for each age group and replete with interpersonal exchanges of opinion, examples of lessons, reasoned discussions, and other useful demonstrations of teaching techniques.

Another contemporary work that most likely served Beaumont as a model in presenting accessible teaching material was Sarah Fielding's The Governess; or the Little

Female Academy (1749). This fictional account of the boarding school instruction of nine young ladies by their middle-aged teacher, the widow Mrs. Teachum, is set out in rather

152 informal daily programs that include lessons in morality and personal testimonies by the students regarding their own challenges, set out in a dialogue format. The text also includes short fantasy or fairy tales, although their rather gruesome stories most certainly fall into Beaumont's category of inappropriate for young minds. 18 Most similar to

Beaumont's Magasins in structure, The Governess differs in such aspects as its general objective and the somewhat less scholastic nature of the topics treated. Indeed, Fielding was more focused on writing a fictional narrative of moral instruction for the entertainment of young English girls, filling the void that Locke bemoaned regarding the dearth of proper materials from which children could pleasurably learn. Writing a text in which her biographer, Linda Bree says that "reason, logic, and self-discipline triumph over inconsiderate and antisocial selfishness" (Bree 60), Fielding was writing first and foremost for young women whose education she addresses by adding this text to their repertoire of enjoyable and educational materials. Given the popularity of The Governess, it is not surprising that Beaumont would have utilized much of the structure and purpose of that book in her own pedagogical handbooks, even though she may have objected to the nature of Fielding's fairy tales or the lack of more scholarly topics in that text.

Beaumont's first novel, Le Triomphe de la verite, ou les memoires de Monsieur de la Villette (1748), was actually her first text dealing with education and proposing her non-traditional approach to pedagogical methodology. This fictional narrative recounts a young man's education as developed by his parents, who preferred an interactive and deductive form of instruction. Raised in the country, the child was left to learn by observing nature, removed during his earliest years from any contact with the outside world and its societal prejudices. Under the guidance of his father, and with his mother's

153 intervention for specific situations, the young man discovers morality, empathy, and other qualities associated with a virtuous member of the French eighteenth-century upper class, qualities that guide him through his reintegration into society with all of its temptations for unproductive and even harmful behavior.

A similar chronology of mentored education from birth to adulthood is the primary subject of Beaumont's second novel, Civan, roi de Bungo: his to ire japonnoise ou tableau del'education d'un prince (1754). Once again a child is taken out of the trajectory of traditional education and placed in an environment where his instruction, overseen by the wise adults Asor and Dulica, is steeped in experiences that hone his reasoning skills, and his ability to think independently. In this sixteenth-century story that originates and ends in Japan, majority of volume one takes the main characters across

Europe as they travel to and from France, providing the reader with a history of Japan and the European nations along the way. The adults who plan and implement all the facets of Civan's studies develop a strategy based upon the child's natural inclinations

("chaque enfant demande une methode particuliere et consequente a son caractere" I each child needs a particular method based on his personality; Civan vol. I, 41 ), the elements of nature ("le corps s'endurcit et se fortifie par la vie dure, pourvu qu'on l'y accoutume de bonne heure et par degres" I the body is hardened and strengthens itself by hard living, as long as one starts acclimating it early and in stages; 44), and a well-determined plan with objectives for each stage of his development. The book exemplifies those learning priorities that would be an essential part of Beaumont's pedagogical methodology throughout her lifetime.

154 By the time she wrote Civan, Beaumont had been a governess in France and

England for twenty years and had already written the Education complete, her three­ volume pedagogical handbook for the royal family of England. Having such a wealth of hands-on experience already documented in such a complete manual, it is not surprising that her subsequent novel contains such a cohesively detailed structure for each phase of young Prince Civan's instruction. In fact, Beaumont's narrator occasionally speaks directly to her readers to assure them that the guidelines proposed in this fictional tale can be integrated into any teaching scenario:

Je m'arrete ici un moment pour repondre a mon Lecteur; je l'entends

s'ecrier: se moque-t-on de nous, de vouloir nous faire croire des enfants de

huit a douze ans capables de telle recreations ? Et pourquoi non si'il VOUS

plait, lui repondrais-je ?

I stop here a moment to respond to my Reader, whom I hear crying out:

are we being mocked, make to believe that children eight to twelve years

old are capable of such activities? And why not, please, I would answer.

(Civan, 1: 81).

One can easily see in such extra-diegetic dialogue the foreshadowing of the Magasin des enfants, which was published two years after Civan. Those well-structured teaching manuals provided practical answers to the questions that Beaumont hoped would be raised by parents and teachers throughout the world who read her work and cared about childhood education. The swift popularity of her works seems to have proved her right.

In formulating the content of her texts, Beaumont maintained that everyone is born with flaws, but that good people were corrected in childhood, unlike bad or evil

155 people ("nous naissons to us avec des defauts: les honnetes gens, quand ils etoient jeunes, en avoient autant que les mechants, mais les premiers se sont corriges: voila toute la difference qu'il y a." I we are all born with flaws: honest people had as many as bad people when they were young, but the former have been corrected; that is all the difference there is; Magasin des enfants 1: 144-5). This is similar to Locke, who writes in Some Thoughts Concerning Education that "we see children, as soon almost as they are born (I am sure long before they can speak) cry, grow peevish, sullen, and out of humor, for nothing but to have their wills. They would have their desires submitted to by others" (Section 104), and then suggests how to counter those negative tendencies to create a sensible adult. Rousseau, the most recognized proponent of change in educational practices in the mid to late eighteenth century, has a slightly different position, for although he too espouses the notion that good actions will dominate the character when they are encouraged in children, he maintains that this goodness is innate and will rise naturally to the surface. Beaumont and Locke before her both define the. work comprised in such an objective as a process. Rousseau, however, suggests that nature has already completed the process and will be successful only if we let her run her course and get out ofthe way. Yet Rousseau's Emile is such a complex handbook, explaining in the smallest detail the approach to be taken for each childhood scenario that a parent or educator might encounter, that it leaves the reader to question why letting nature run her course should be so complicated.

In Emile, Rousseau proceeds through pis course of examples and the numerous situations that one encounters in the life and training of a child, Rousseau comments on his use of real world examples to provide material for his readers, "Pour nous qui ne

156 donnons a nos eleves que des le<;ons de pratique et qui aimons mieux qu'ils soient bons que savants" (for those of us who only give our students practical lessons and who would rather that they be good than knowledgeable; 173). It seems, however, that the narrator has forgotten that Emile is fictional ("j 'ai done pris le parti de me donner un eleve imaginaire" I thus I make the decision to give myself an imaginary student; 100), and that he is made up of the best components to create an ideal though unlikely learning environment: physically healthy, from a middle-European climate, born of the upper classes, and a male orphan from the moment of his birth. This is not education for everyone, but only for an elite group of young men. 19 In contrast, the conversations and lessons that appear in the works of Beaumont are, we know, the result of her actual lessons with her students, whose names often appear in her texts. In the introduction to the Magasin des adolescentes, for example, she writes "on trouvera dans ce Magasin quelques nouveaux personnages. S'ils etaient d'imagination, peut-etre les aurais-je autrement choisi ... Je travaille d'apres la nature, mes eleves me fournissent des originaux dans tousles genres" (you will find some new characters in this journal. If they were imaginary, perhaps I would have chosen differently ... I work according to nature, my students provide me with originals of all types; 1; xv). Beaumont, then, operates on a very different plane, a world that is far more reflective of her readers' own situations, thus creating a more plausible starting point for them.

This is not to say that the theories of Rousseau are of misguided, for clearly they were instrumental in bringing attention to the condition of childhood education and in advancing the kind of child-oriented approach to pedagogy that Beaumont, Locke,

Fielding, and other thinkers were advocating. In the case of Rousseau, however, it is

157 important to realize the limits in the application of his theories and, of great importance to his adepts and his critics alike, to bear in mind his disregard for the education of girls.

Tales, Tasks, and Tools of the Trade

So how did Beaumont propose to reach her students? Her early years of study followed by decades of hands-on interaction with students of varying ages led Beaumont to develop her own approach to instruction, one which required paying closer attention to the students, considering them as individuals with specific aptitudes and skills. Engaging her charges in the learning process became a priority, directing her focus on the importance of education as a path to reflection, reasoning, and good decisions. This pedagogue experimented with the more interactive techniques of storytelling, dialogue and role-play, teaching toys, and situational analysis that forced her students to reflect, finding their own solutions to problems. Particularly in this last category, her agenda of physical activities and applications differentiates her texts from most earlier models or even those of her contemporaries, up until the publication of Rousseau's Emile.

One very significant issue for Beaumont in the texts she used and ultimately wrote herself was their accessibility to the students. As noted above, she commented regularly on the fact that so many students did not read because they disliked it. The cause, she asserted, was obvious: "Le degofit d'un grand nombre d'enfants pour la lecture vient de la nature des livres qu'on leur met entre les mains; ils ne les comprennent pas, et de la nait inevitablement l'ennui" (The distaste for reading in many children comes from the kind of books that are put into their hands; they do not understand them, and from there boredom is inevitably born; Magasin des enfants 1: iii). Yet she made clear that many valuable texts existed, and should be seen as an integral part of any educational

158 plan. Once again, her reasoning was simple, as Miss Bonne reiterated to her students and their visitors in the Magasin des adolescentes: "On trouve dans les bons livres quantite d'exemples qui nous encouragent ala vertu" (you find in good books a great number of examples that promote virtue; 1: 53). For Beaumont, then, the way in which the material was communicated was of utmost importance, but the material should also be worth communicating. Valuable lessons should be made part of interesting books if either one were to be useful.

One obvious way that Beaumont made her handbooks appealing to students was to include short stories or fairy tales. Her first books designed as teaching tools were the three volumes of the Education complete, whose stories were in fact histories of such ancients as the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. Beginning with the Magasin des enfants, however, Beaumont began including fictional tales ostensibly to reward her students for applying themselves to their lessons, but in fact as another avenue for imparting such values as honesty, loyalty, respect, and humility. The Magasin des enfants contains such stories as "Beauty and the Beast," "Prince Charming," "Prince Fatal and Prince

Fortunate," and "Prince Cheri," all introduced to her students as fictional tales that provide a moral to be discussed and, if appropriate, applied to their own lives. Juxtaposed with these stories, the reader finds admonitions from Greek mythology in which the stories are seen to be truths that fool those who hear them with false ideas.

There are ten distinct tales in the four volumes of that original series, of which the most famous is "Beauty and the Beast." Beaumont's skill as a teacher and a storyteller is at its finest in that tale, for while the reader is enthralled with these two characters and their most unusual situation, the narrator is also transmitting core personal values.

159 Beauty, as critic Betsey Hearne reminds us, is well educated by a father who provides all of his children with the best teachers, 20 works hard, and is a good person. Her sisters, on the other hand, are lazy, proud and jealous; they end up turned to stone (18). These characteristics are all representative of those values that Beaumont hopes to instill in students.

Yet Beaumont is equally outspoken about the fact that so-called children's fables actually have the potential to harm young people by giving them a false sense of what is virtuous and moral behavior. In the later novel Clarice, the heroine's friend Hariote writes to her from Paris, "il y a ici des auteurs qui semblent avoir pris a tache d'essayer jusqu'ou peut aller la sottise du public. Des Contes de Fees, qui n'ont d'autre merite que d'etre obscenes, des Anecdotes scandaleuses: voila de quoi traitent tous ces livres du jour" (here there are some authors who seem to have taken up the task of trying to see just how far public foolishness can go. Fairy tales that have no other merit than to be obscene, scandalous legends: that is what all of these contemporary books are about; 1:

101 ). Beaumont's writing of her own short stories can also be viewed as an opposition to this genre of existing stories, creating instead these tales that are more comprehensible to her students and, at the same time, providing them with what Patricia Clancy calls "the solid middle-class virtues of goodness, simplicity, generosity and affection which

Rousseau would make so popular in the sixties with La Nouvelle Heloise" ("A French

Writer and Educator in England" 196). Clancy forgets one of Beaumont's favorite virtues, though, that of reason.

This emphasis on the benefits and harm of fairy tales in childhood education is something on which Rousseau and Beaumont clearly agree, and where Beaumont breaks

160 with Sarah Fielding. Rousseau insists that Emile will not be taught to memorize, and assuredly will not be taught La Fontaine's fables. There is, he affirms, no value for children in their morals, for they cannot see through the veiled stories these fables tell:

"On fait apprendre les fables de Lafontaine a tousles enfants, et il n'y a pas un seul qui les entende; quand ils les entendroient ce seroit encore pis, car la morale en est tellement melee et si disproportionnee a leur age qu' elle les porteroit plus au vice qu' a la vertu"

(we teach La Fontaine's fables to all children, and there is not one who understands them; should they understand them it would be even worse, for the moral of them is so confused and so inappropriate to their age that it [the morale] would bring them more vice than virtue; Emile 188). He dissects these well-known fables written specifically for children, highlighting their unfortunate connotations, their confusing use of language and irony, and the overall difficulty a child would encounter in making sense of this short text. In fact, what he sees in several fables cited21 are lessons in the advantages of bad behavior, "une le<;on de la plus basse flaterie ... d'inhumanite ... d'injustice ... de satire ... d'independance" (A lesson in the basest flattery ... inhumanity ... injustice ..

. satire ... independence; Emile, 187-8). Given such negative potential in these popular tales, Rousseau insists that they be reserved for adults who are better prepared to understand their morals and apply them with reason to their actions within society.

Another concept that was prevalent in Beaumont's methods was the importance of play for children. Here both Locke and Rousseau also agreed on the addition of physical activities in the learning process, and Beaumont champions it in her practical lessons of implementation. In the Magasin des enfants, for example, the reader follows a discussion between Lady Spiritual and Miss Bonne about the transformation of

161 caterpillars when the former returns from running in the park with a butterfly (1: 106-10).

First the governess explains the scientific process step by step, from the laying of eggs on a leaf and subsequent warming in the sun until the appearance of caterpillars. As other young girls ask questions about their habitat and their nourishment, the cycle related in the text and a science lesson has taken a hands-on, practical manifestation that any young adult can understand and, even more pertinent, can replicate. The story of Noah's ark on the following pages also allows for interactive Biblical instruction along with a practical explanation of the physics of floating boats, which the girls ultimately recreate by putting heavy boards in the garden's pool (1: 114-5). Throughout the magasins the students are sent to play, to work in the garden, to take walks, or to engage in other forms of physical activity to complement their scholastic tasks.

In addition to these demonstrations and experiments, Beaumont's handbooks provided their audience with physical resources. Contemporary historian Jill Shefrin discusses the use of play through educational toys, and in particular what she refers to as dissected maps. The creation of these colored wooden maps with removable pieces representing countries, provinces, or other geographic designations is attributed directly to Beaumont by Shefrin and other researchers. Shefrin cites letters of Mrs. Mary Delany in December 1759 and again in June 1760 that refer directly to this innovative learning tool, calling them specifically "Madame Beaumont's wooden maps" (5). Beaumont's students in the Magasin des enfants are first introduced to the concept of geography during a lesson on Noah's ark, and Miss Bonne speaks to the students of maps that are available for purchase from Palairet, who manufactured them for educational purposes. 22

This early reference would situate the existence of the dissected maps as early as the

162 1756 publication of that text. In this same passage, Miss Bonne invites her students to see volume I, page 10 of Palairet' s Introduction a la Geographie moderne, indicating the author's great respect for the work ofthis vendor and, most certainly, a strong collaboration as well. There are, in fact, many instances when Beaumont's manuals direct the students to other learning tools or reference books, as noted above apropos of Rollin's text.

The use of toys to facilitate learning was not a new concept. Locke had already mentioned the use of toys to entice children to learn, giving a brief example in Some

Thoughts Concerning Education:

I have therefore thought, that if play-things were fitted to this purpose, as

they are usually to none, contrivances might be made to teach children to

read, whilst they thought they were only playing. For example, what if an

ivory-ball were made like that of the royal-oak lottery, with thirty two

sides, or one rather of twenty four or twenty five sides; and upon several

of those sides pasted on an A, upon several others B, on others C, and on

others D? (Section 150)

The detailed description goes on, giving the reader various ways that the ball can be used in teaching the alphabet, reading, and subsequent skills. It is certainly noteworthy, and may have provided inspiration to Beaumont in her own experimentation with learning apparatuses. Her reader learns to take have students make wooden boats that they float in the pond to better understand the physics of water displacement (Magasin des enfants, 1:

113-5), and later the reader is shown how to use a common tea-kettle to demonstrate that

163 water from a river is the same water that forms clouds and falls as rain (Magasin des enfants 2:405-6).

However, it is her implementation that differentiates her from the suggestions that other philosophers may have included in their texts. Only Beaumont provides her students and their instructors with such effective tools and resources that poor teaching methods have no excuse.

Conclusion

In a climate of superficial educational practices, Beaumont was truly a champion of pedagogy at every level. As Patricia Clancy aptly notes, "during the years Mme de

Beaumont spent in England, she was almost alone in publicly expressing her ideals for women and in putting her ideas on solid intellectual training for girls into practice" ("A

French Writer and Educator in England" 205). Although others promoted various aspects of her methodology, Beaumont gleaned what was best from many sources to create her own alternative, highly structured and yet fully flexible model for adaptation to each student's needs. Beaumont was alone in offering not just the system but its hands-on application to parents, tutors, and students. Focused on the educators as well as the education, on the students as well as the studies, Beaumont's handbooks, novels, fairy tales, and essays all addressed education as a structured process to be taken seriously.

How widespread was the influence of Beaumont the pedagogue? A look at the popularity of her works, and their presence in a significant number and type of personal libraries, confirms the widespread interest in her methodologies and her status as an authority in the field. 23 It appears that many educators who followed Beaumont made use of her abundant resource of applied materials. Her teaching methods were well-known

164 and well-respected during her lifetime, as reflected in the correspondence of her British employers and their circle. Shefrin cites references to Beaumont's teaching, to her writings, and to her dissected maps in correspondence from Mrs. Mary Delany, from

Lady Caroline Fox, and Lady Pomfret, mother to Lady Charlotte Finch and her most prominent English employer. Beaumont's desire to train others to become better teachers is apparent in the replication of many of her techniques by Lady Charlotte, former student and subsequent tutor to King George II as chronicled by Shefrin, and by Felicite de

Genlis, whose use of similar pedagogical toys and scale models for her royal French students in the 1780s is now the subject of a permanent exposition at the Musee des arts et metiers in Paris. This exhibit displays many of the models or miniatures ("maquettes") that Madame de Genlis had constructed for her charges, the Duke of Chartres' children who included the future king Louis-Philippe. The models were part of the hands-on approach to learning that de Genlis espoused, and are based on trades and crafts that are described in Diderot and D' Alembert's Encyclopedie, including a woodworking shop, a chemistry laboratory, a locksmith workshop, and a pottery studio.

One other interesting though indirect tribute to the significance of Beaumont's work on the educators that followed her is found in Nicolas Hans' study, New Trends in

Education in the Eighteenth Century ( 1951 ). Although this dated work features little in the way of contemporary interpretations of Enlightenment methodologies and contexts, it documents the impact of early women educators on the private schools and their broadened curricula in the latter part of the eighteenth century by tracking specific schools for girls. Hans lists numerous girls' schools in England, noting most offered "a sound foundation in English, French and Latin languages and literature and taught history

165 and geography, and evidently Greek and Italian to some girls" (199). The existence of such schools where instruction in topics previously unavailable to girls but such an important part of Beaumont's legacy speaks to her influence with English educators.

Hans describes, for example, Mrs. Margaret Bryan, who operated a girls' boarding school in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Although he finds no biographical information on this schoolteacher, Hans lists her Lectures on Astronomy and

Mathematics (1797), Lectures on Natural Philosophy (1806), Conversations on

Chemistry (1806), and two-volume Comprehensive Astronomical Class Book (1815), all part of classroom presentations originally delivered to her students. Without listing

Beaumont specifically, her influence on subsequent generations of teachers and students is suggested in these examples that recall her own topics.

Such documented improvement to pedagogical methods reinforces the success of

Beaumont's approach to teaching and infers her influence and her importance as a pedagogue, thus presenting one notable aspect of this woman's influence on her generation and those that followed.

1 Jill Shefrin cites letters by such noblewomen as Lady Pomfret, Mrs. Mary Delany, and Lady Caroline

Fox, who refer to Beaumont's position as governess of their children (Introduction).

2 One of few researchers focused specifically on the life of Beaumont, Roubain' s recent biography is quite thorough but critically unacknowledged.

3 Her given name was Marie-Barbe Nicole, although she was known her entire life as Jeanne-Marie.

4 There seems to be some discrepancy in the records. The Diocese of Rouen shows that a school was founded by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart or Sisters ofErnemont, hospitaliers and teachers in 1690, while the Catholic encyclopedia New Advent puts the date at 1698. However, Robain attributes its creation to

166 these women and a local archbishop in 1725. Whatever its origin, this school still exists, known today as the Sacre Coeur d'Ernemont.

5 Jean Queniart cites Montaigne's proposition that "une femme est assez savante quand elle sait mettre difference entre Ia chemise et le pourpoint de son mari" (a woman is knowledgeable enough when she can differentiate between her husband's shirt and his vest), a quote that is referenced by Moliere's husband in

"L'Ecole de femmes" (Histoire de l'enseignement et de !'education II 479). Paule Constant also alludes to these literary references (318).

6 This literary dispute began in France and England in the seventeenth century, pitting authors and critics against each other. The "Ancients" maintained that Classical1iterature of Greece and Rome offered the only models for literary excellence, while the "Moderns" challenged the supremacy of the Classical writers.

7 See, for example, the conversation between Lady Spirituelle and Mme Bonne in the Magasin des enfans

(106) regarding butterflies and caterpillars.

8 Beaumont's citation appears in chapter 2 above.

9 For example, in the second volume of the Magasins des adolescentes, Miss Bonne cuts short a discussion on the Laconians of by sending her students to do some research: "je vous charge,

Mesdames, de lire dans l'abrege de votre histoire universelle, et ensuite dans Monsieur Rollin ce qui les regarde" (I assign you, Ladies, to read in your abridged world history books, and then in Mr. Rollin, about them; 2: 197)

10 See chapter 2 above for a more detailed discussion of the French salon.

11 Maria Edgeworth wrote Practical Education (1798) in collaboration with her father. A book written in dialogue form for children of both sexes, Sotiropoulos incorrectly calls it "the first detailed handbook for parents and home tutors since Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education" (126).

12 The general subjects mentioned are French, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history.

13 In the introduction to Instructions pour les jeunes dames qui entrent dans le Monde (1764), Beaumont describes how a young boy, complaining about the boring texts, is encouraged to study: "S'il est petit, on le fouette pour forcer son application; s'il est grand, on lui repete les grands mots de gloire, de reputation, de fortune, et on parvient a 1' engager a surmonter les repugnances les plus fortes" (if he is small, he is

167 whipped to force him to apply himself; if he is big, they repeat the lofty words of glory, reputation, and fortune, and they succeed in getting him to overcome even the strongest repulsion; 1: i).

14 In section 70 of Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke questions parents who allow their children to evolve in unsupervised boarding schools were instructional courses are true to the classical standards but manners and virtues are neglected by untrained adults: "you must confess, that you have a strange value for words, when preferring the languages of the ancient Greeks and Romans to that which made them such brave men, you think it worth while to hazard your son's innocence and virtue for a little Greek and Latin."

15 Albert Cherel, one of the most respected biographers of Fenelon, is quite clear in his introduction of the novel: "Telemaque etait destine aux princes" (300).

16 See introduction to the Magasin des adolescentes, where Beaumont speaks of lessons "pour des dames de quinze a dix-huit ans" (for ladies from fifteen to eighteen years old; 1: xix).

17 Pierre Coste was the most prominent translator of Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education. He was responsible for at least eight editions of that text, beginning in 1695. His French title is De L'Education des enfans.

18 In her biography of Fielding, Linda Bree comments that the use of fairy tales in any type of pedagogical text was "known to be controversial in early education theory" (66). This is yet another factor that categorizes both Fielding and Beaumont as usual and even radical in their thoughts and their writings.

19 Rousseau is not alone in this position, and clearly the education that Locke describes in his texts and treatises is geared to the education of a select few. As James Axtell writes, "Locke, as well as nearly every other educator of the century, was writing only for the small class of men -at most 4-5 percent of the population- who enjoyed the rank title, and privileges of '' or above, what has been aptly called the 'one-class society" (51).

20 The text states: "11 n'epargna rien pour !'education de ses enfants, et leur donna toutes sortes de maitres"

(he spared nothing in the education of his children, and gave them all kinds of tutors; 1: 71 ).

21 He cites specifically "Le Corbeau et le renard," "La Cigale et la fourmi," "Le Lion et le moucheron," "Le

Loup et le chien gras" ("The Crow and the Fox," "The Grasshopper and the Ant," "The Lion and the Fly," and "The Wolf and the Dog"; 188).

168 22 The citation from the text instructs the students to "voyez la premiere Mapemonde de l'Atlas

Methodique, de Mr. Palairet" (Look at the first world map in Mr. Palairet' s Standard Atlas (1: 157-8).

23 Barbara Kaltz offers the most complete inventory and analysis of Beaumont's works in their numerous editions and translations.

169 Chapter 4

Alternatives in Enlightenment Social Consciousness

The reality of any hegemony, in the extended

political and cultural sense, is that, while by

definition it is always dominant, it is never either

total or exclusive.

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature

Gradually, as Beaumont's French and British audiences increasingly appreciated her pedagogical theories and methods, her impact reached from France and England to their eastern European neighbors, and crossed the Atlantic to the American colonies, where the new cities and states were also concerning themselves with the education of their children. 1 In all these milieus, an important aspect of her philosophy for education was its ability to be applied to real world situations, and in particular its precept of

"change through action" that teaches students to analyze the information available to them in order to make reasonable and morally just decisions.

Turning now to the content of her texts as they explore those real world situations, it is important to consider the particular social conditions relevant specifically to her audiences in eighteenth-century France. Although chapter 1 addressed the notion of

170 inequality between the sexes as a social priority for Beaumont, her writings often touched on other forms of prejudice that included class, ethnicity, and national origin. Her bourgeois roots were also reinforced by her financial situation requiring her to work to support herself,2 making her particularly attuned to the escalating discourse on economic reform in Europe. This interest was accentuated during the years that she spent on her own farmlands in rural France after returning from England in 1763, and her awareness of agricultural reform and land use issues is manifest often in her novels and essays of that period.

Emerging trends in social consciousness during the Enlightenment, however, cannot be adequately evaluated without considering the place of religion in the debate, particularly where Beaumont is concerned. Religious references run throughout her entire body of work, informing her methodology and pervading her discourse. From her earliest

Lettre en reponse a "L'Annee Merveilleuse," where she uses the creation story to illustrate God's infinite power and wisdom, to the final La Devotion eclairee and its unique topic of faith and its application, Biblical sources reinforce Beaumont's writings with regularity. As the topic of religion took on significance in the escalating debate about the secularization of public institutions, so Beaumont's work reflected her growing concern over the dismissal of religion from people's lives and her insistence on it as a means of achieving a better personal life and a better communal and even global society.

To better understand the issues at stake in this debate, a closer look at the presence of religion and its applications in the Enlightenment context and in Beaumont's writing begins this chapter's analysis of social consciousness in her works.

171 The Religious Debate

The institution of the Church as a locus of religious or theological disputes appears in French literature as far back as the playful collection of thirteenth-century humorous tales collectively entitled the Roman de Renard (1170 to 1250). As in many a farce and fabliau, village priests and the rituals of the Church were mocked as self­ serving and often in opposition to the good of the people. Similarly, satirical portraits of the Church and its representatives were prominent in such sixteenth-century works as

Rabelais' Gargantua (1534) and Pantagruel (1532). Yet the importance of religion itself was never at issue. In fact, during this same period, Montaigne's Essays (1580s),

Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron (1559), and many other major texts were documenting the importance of faith and Christianity in the lives of moral citizens. On one hand, then, we find Montaigne's serious essays like the "Apologie de Raymond

Sebond," defending the theological treatise of Sebond (Essais, II: 12), while on the other hand, Rabelais offers readers a comic scene in which the clergy, entrusted with the protection of their abbey, lose their nerve and ability to reason when faced with a dangerous situation, and ultimately resort to "une belle procession, renforcee de beaux prechans & litanies contra hostium insidias, & beaux responds pro pace" (a lovely procession, supported by lovely sermons and litanies against the warring army;

Gargantua 139). Rabelais' mix of French and Latin phrases only adds to the mockery of this representation. French literature has long been enriched by this deep vein of anti­ clerical humor running alongside, and occasionally colliding with, lofty moral and theological preachings.

172 By the seventeenth century, ardent support of the Church and its role in society was apparent in such prominent works as Corneille's Le Cid (1636), Pascal's Pensees

(1670), and even Descartes' Discours de la methode (1637) which relied on heavily moral codes underscored by religious references to secure their themes. Racine obliged royal preferences when he wrote his Esther (1689) for Madame de Maintenon's St. Cyr schoolgirls. Yet the continued criticism of the false "devots" who populated the Church was still apparent in the period's literature, as Moliere's Le Tartuffe (1664) aptly demonstrated. This was the period when the status of France's Huguenots was disputed and ultimately decided by the 1685 revocation of Henri IV's Edict of Nantes (1598), 3 and a time of increased questioning of the institutional principles of the Church by theologians and philosophers alike. Powerful ecclesiasts tied to the government, proponents of a France unified under Roman Catholicism, were countered by such reformers as Pierre Bayle, a French Huguenot and Christian scholar. His texts, particularly the Pensees diverses sur la comete de 1680 (1682), promoted instead a pluralist state, positing that every religion believes in the truth of its precepts. These early arguments provided a foundation for the Enlightenment debate that followed, resounding through the next century as the ongoing secularization of national institutions gained public acceptability, epitomized most dramatically by Louis XV's closing of Jesuit schools in 17 64. As noted by Diane Brown, "Louis XV' s edict abolishing the largest teaching order in eighteenth-century France left colleges all over France without instructors" (471-2).

As in preceding centuries, this topic of religion sat squarely in the eighteenth century's intellectual and cultural debate, for as Paul Benichou' s concluded about French

173 history, "il n'est pas d'epoque qui ne soit le champ d'une lutte entre des forces differentes, entre des idees contraires" (there is no period that is not the battlefield for differing forces, for opposite ideas; 10). Such a statement is particularly apt in the discussion of religion during the Enlightenment, for it is too often assumed by modern critics and historians that the thought and beliefs of that period rather easily shifted from a society of religious dominance to one of secular institutionalization. Isaiah Berlin recognized the complexity of this shift, and advanced the notion of dominance in the conflict of ideas as one in which ultimately one "subject gains ascendancy ... and, as a result of the enormous hold which it has upon the imagination of its generation, it is applied in other spheres as well"

(Roots of Romanticism 5). Yet even Berlin and others who offer an opposing position to that of unimpeded, steady secular dominance tend to present the period issue as having only two extremes, one side for religion and one side against it. What is undervalued in these approaches is the notion of nuance and micro-shifts over time, of fluidity in which such opposition must evolve. As new ideas gain or lose importance, old beliefs are not necessary discarded in toto, but may be modified to reflect new conditions. This is the case for what the modern critic Raymond Williams calls emerging trends, which may take hold in full force, transform by incorporating old or residual ideas, or lose significance over the course of time to disappear completely. In his 1977 discussion of cultural hegemony (from which the epigraph of this chapter is taken), Williams examines that phenomenon of ideological fluidity in societies, and classifies the three components of any cultural change as residual, dominant, and emergent, while recognizing the constant movement that occurs within all social systems as thought develops and theories gain or lose prominence (Williams 1283-5). It is this broader view of the of the

174 Enlightenment debate on religion and the secular that helps explicate the religious and social philosophy of Beaumont as an alternative perspective to today' s canonically accepted views of the period.

Catholicism and Faith

Beginning with her earliest writings, Beaumont assimilated the fundamental notions of religious belief into her broad philosophy of morality. She was undoubtedly provided with intense religious instruction during her ten years at the convent school of

Ernemont,4 and her work exhibits a thorough knowledge of the Bible and a familiarity with a wide spectrum of religious texts from St. Augustine to Fenelon, whose Traite she references often. Her second major text, Lettres diverses et critiques, demonstrated that training unmistakably. A lengthy critique in that text's second volume focused on the Les

Mreurs (1748) by Fran~ois Vincent Toussaint (1715-72), a rather controversial book outlining what the author himself calls his "essais sur la morale" (Les Mreurs vi). 5

Beaumont spends the first two sections complimenting the author on his choice of subject

-essays on such topics as piety, love, justice, and duty to God intended to form a more virtuous individual- and commenting rather favorably on his study. However, she is a severe critic when the ideas proposed contradict what Beaumont sees as sacred guidelines set by Jesus himself, those of establishing the Church for worshiping God. Toussaint proposes an "interior" and "exterior" faith, describing the latter as one created by priests and overloaded with ceremonies to make themselves important, and having the result of

"des partages, des divisions, et des vicissitudes" (separations, divisions, and tribulations;

Les Mreurs 1:42). She reprimands such an approach which she claims examines

Christianity from the wrong direction; exterior acts are not meant to encourage faith but

175 are instead outward expressions of interior faith. Acts of violence by any sect contradicts the Bible and its tenets, she affirms. "Jesus-Christ ordonne a Pierre de remettre I' epee dans le fourreau, et de n'employer pour etablir la sienne [religion], que la douceur & les bons exemples de la vertu ... Voila, Monsieur, ce que la raison m'a dictee sur vos

Mreurs: je suis femme, et par consequent dispensee de !'obligation d'etre savante; mais non de celle de reflechir" (Jesus Christ commands Peter to put his sword back into the scabbard, and to use only kindness and good examples of virtue to establish his own

[religion] ... That, , is what reason indicated to me regarding your Morals: I am a woman, and therefore freed from the obligation of being knowledgeable, but not from that of thinking; Lettres diverses et critiques 2: 48). Beaumont positions herself as a moral reader who encourages the author in his desire to expose religious thought to the reading public, yet also as an astute critic who cannot accept what she sees as erroneous, non-Christian theories. Using her gender as a foil for her use of simplistic analytical tools

- reason and the Bible - Beaumont argues effectively for a more tempered and thoughtful use of Christianity without eliminating the Church itself, putting herself in the footsteps of Locke and his Letter Concerning Toleration6 but in clear opposition to emerging discourse calling for the elimination of the institutional Church as Toussaint suggested.

Beaumont's philosophical principles entailed a deep and intimate knowledge of the Bible, which she considered the source of all moral and spiritual guidance. Following in the tradition of Marguerite de Navarre and the Renaissance French "evangeliques"7 who disdained the "abstruse formulations of the medieval theologians" (Cave 118),

Beaumont embraced what she believed was the original Roman Catholic faith as expressed in the New Testament teachings of Jesus and his apostles. This position,

176 expressed repeatedly from the earliest of her writings, appears in the Magasin des enfants, for example, where her first advice to the young ladies searching for knowledge and instruction begins with an unambiguous directive: "il faut vous instruire de la Sainte­

Ecriture. C' est un livre divin qui a ete dicte par le Saint-Esprit; ainsi, il faut le lire, l'apprendre, et le repeter avec un profond respect ... Souvenez-vous bien, mes enfants, que cette histoire est la seule, sur laquelle il n'est pas permis de douter" (you must learn the Holy Scriptures. This is a heavenly book that was dictated by the Holy Spirit; therefore, you must read it, learn it, and repeat it with profound respect ... Remember, my children, that this is the only story that it is not permitted to doubt; 49-50). This reliance on the sacred book itself is in contrast with the more traditional practice of faith in France that relied on priests and church officials to explain and interpret Biblical texts for believers, 8 although many of her fictional characters also make use of the personal witness of believers to reinforce the strength of scriptural application. As a Catholic of her time, to recommend to her students that they should read and interpret the Bible was a rather bold act in itself. Beaumont strikes a median point between those who would reject religion for "reason," and those who would reject "reason" for "religion."

Beaumont's reliance on the Bible and the importance of the Gospels in particular, was also reflective of those whose texts she had studied and integrated into her arsenal of resources. In addition to the French authors whose work she admired (she often refers to

Fenelon, Descartes, Pascal, and Rollin), Beaumont evidently found a model in the work of John Locke, whose popularity was increasing in France thanks to the rapidity of translations and the acclamation of Voltaire, with whom Beaumont shared a literary connection.9 Locke's Thoughts Concerning Education would have been standard reading

177 for Beaumont. His Biblical citations abound in that text as in others, anchoring his views on education, toleration, political authority, and human understanding. In fact, the opening paragraph alone of A Letter Concerning Toleration contains four New Testament citations. Such an example of Biblical reference would not have been lost on Beaumont.

Reason is the primary means of addressing religious beliefs in this and other

Beaumont texts. In a clear recurrence to the philosophical positions of Rene Descartes

( 1596-1650), her characters use phrases familiar to most eighteenth-century intellectuals.

Says one young student: "J'existe, je suisun Etre capable d'apercevoir, de comparer, de juger, et de choisir. C'est dire que je possede un entendement et une volonte" (I exist, I am a Being capable of observing, of comparing, of judging, and of choosing. That is to say that I possess an understanding and free will; Les Americaines 1: 68). Beaumont adopted this approach in opposition to most of her male contemporaries, who believed that when Descartes correctly discarded the errors of the Ancients he merely replaced them with his own. Yet support for her position could be found in the unexpected source of her Anglican sisters, particularly in the work of Mary Astell (1666-1731). Earlier in the century, Astell had opposed Locke with her insistence on the Cartesian separation of mind and matter, fearing that Locke's advocacy of sensational knowledge would

"undermine Cartesian separation of mind and matter" (Sotiropoulos 125). 10 Beaumont was clearly influenced by Astell and many contemporary English women writers who had chosen to embrace an older, more scripturally exacting faith, a "primitive Christianity in an increasingly secular society" (Johns 29), preferring their deeply rooted spirituality to the "tendance definitivement anti-clericale" (Laborde 43) of her French contemporary

Madeleine de Puisieux. Even du Chatelet, whose Discours sur le Bonheur (1746-8)

178 delves into the foundations of individual happiness and a rationalization of faith, does not demonstrate the same orientation for religiously-based methodology in the style of

Beaumont and the British women cited above (Zinsser). The beliefs of these women in the power of the Bible itself and in the independent nature of intellectual investigation as found in Descartes, supported Beaumont's position that the female mind has an absolute capacity for serious thought. 11 In addition, her certainty that the truth of God prevails over all recalled the very process found in the Discours de la methode (1637), and reinforced her affinity with Descartes' approach to reason based upon individual reflection, acceptance of one's condition, and the overarching presence of God.

Although, as noted above, all of Beaumont's texts reflect a Christian influence, by the time she wrote her final instructional text, La Devotion eclairee (1779), there was no doubt of her support of Catholicism and its formative role in the lives of all people. In that text, Madame Bonne - an older version of the young Miss Bonne as moderator - uses a discussion of the notion of perfection to explain that, although much has been written about religion, the true source of her beliefs can be none other than the Bible (16-

17). True to her systematic formula of individual analysis, debate, and action (the subtitle of her Magasin des enfants encourages the reader to ''penser, parler, agir"), Madame

Bonne identifies the Bible as the original source of information along with the personal obligation to prefer it to any replacement, whether text or testimony. With her zeal for public readership of the Bible, 12 Beaumont often sounded like a proponent of the

Reformation ideals she ostensibly rejected. The ideals that she promoted are certainly in line 'with the original concerns expressed by such dissenters as Martin Luther, whose translation of the New Testament from Greek into German in the early sixteenth century

179 was designed to encourage its study by all the faithful. As noted above, she also echoes

many of the stances taken by Astell, whose writings call women to "be as like God in

purity, Charity, and all his imitable excellencies" (A Serious Proposal 58). Indeed, her

objective was to bring all readers to Catholic theology as embodied in the Church of

Rome, the only church "fondee par Jesus qui sera avec elle jusqu'a Ia consommation des

siecles" (founded by Jesus who will be with her until the end of time; Les Americaines 4:

149). Upon closer inspection, her aim was that of all other religious reformers who

argued for a return to Christianity in its earliest form and devoid of the embellishments

that served only the institutions.

Although her novels are less didactic in their treatment of religion than her

handbooks, their Biblically grounded attitudes place an equally strong emphasis on

Roman Catholicism as the true template for moral conduct in general and Christian conduct in particular. Appearing first in the fictional Triomphe de la verite (1748) and

Civan (1754), references to religion and its foundation in the original teachings of

Christ's church traverse the later novels as well- Lettres de Madame du Montier (1756),

Lettres d'Emerence a Lucie (1766), Memoires de Madame la Baronne de Batteville

( 1766), and La Nouvelle Clarice ( 1767). These more readable texts avoid the direct, instructional approach that the early Magasins' Miss Bonne takes in the examples above, but do not preclude lessons in religious consciousness. In Civan, for example, the narrator details Dulica's conversion of her Japanese husband as the result of his studying both the

Japanese and Christian religious texts thoroughly, with the inevitable result of "une conviction parfaite, et des lors il fut Chretien" (an absolute certainty, and henceforth he was a Christian; 1: 26). In accordance with her pedagogical premise that through

180 educating oneself the best decision is made, Beaumont's character reads the essential doctrines of each faith and matter-of-factly selects the best option: Christianity.

Beaumont's last and most fervently religious texts, from Magasin des pauvres

( 1768) to La Devotion eclairee ( 1779), were written after her return to her homeland that had expelled the Jesuits from their dominant place in the education system in 1764 by shutting down their schools. In France religion had become increasingly out of fashion among the middle and lower class, in an environment described by Mita Choudhury as "a society in which contempt for clerics had transformed into a disenchantment with religion" (128). Modern critic Nigel Aston quotes a disparaging "fishwife" in pre­

Revolutionary Bordeaux who speaks of clerics drinking like princes without a care, and he notes that at least 2,500 clerics were "arrested in Paris between 1755 and 1764 for debauchery" (20). Interestingly, in one of the most expansive recent studies of religion in pre-Revolutionary France, historian John McManners documents a generally positive interaction between local clergy and their congregants, adding credibility to Beaumont's support of the "moral" Church in the reality of French society. It was, perhaps, the declining economic status of their flock that made the Church leaders' stable financial position so difficult to accept. As McManners concedes, "few bishops were scandalous figures, but an aura of worldliness hung around many more of them, lending credence to gossip. Even those who were frugal in their private lives lived in a splendid decor"

(Church and Society 42). Numerous accounts of clergy at all levels abusing their privileges explains the criticism often leveled against them, but also stands in stark contrast with the caring behavior that was, for the most part, exhibited by the majority of common representatives of the Church. McManners adds: "When, against their worldly

181 greatness, is set their activity as 'fathers in God', we can see how the vices coming to them from their ancestry were counterbalanced by the virtues" (243). Even if, as Aston

notes, these French clergy were simply indulging themselves in the same desire for a

comfortable lifestyle that all members of eighteenth-century Europe were seeking (27), the cherished image of the impoverished ecclesiast lost to French parishioners seemed to

generate harsh reactions from the latter and, of course, from the witty philosophes who

found them such an easy target. In essence, to cite critic Robert Palmer, for such reasons

"the Catholic religion was no longer as vital to many people as it once had been. It no longer seemed as essential either to public order or to a satisfactory understanding of the world" (8).

Yet Beaumont had always fully embraced religion as the foundation of morality

and the basis of all of life's activities, keeping it prominent in almost every aspect of her writing. Where Aston pictured a "slow but perceptible diminution from the mid-century of Church authority over an influential portion of the laity of France" (34 ), Beaumont embodied the faithful whose experiences with clergy did not match the negative interaction experienced by such a large - or at least vocal - part of the population. Her life and her work appeared, then, to fall into the category described by historian Darrin

McMahon as "anti-philosophe," defending the Catholic Church and its tenets in the lives of the French people.

McMahon describes a faction of the population- or more precisely, such diverse factions as "militant clergy, members of the parti devot, unenlightened aristocrats, traditional bourgeois, Sorbonne censors, conservative parlementaires, recalcitrant journalists, and many others" (Enemies 6) drawn together by a similar objective,

182 perceiving an escalating danger in the theories of Enlightenment "philosophes." In particular they feared movement toward a more secular government, more tolerant of individual rights and more democratic in its approach to power. McMahon's description of this group of "anti-philosophes" delineates an opposition moving beyond religious morality into a more politically focused agenda: "the fundamental importance of religion in maintaining political order, a preoccupation with the perils of intellectual and social license, the valorization of the family and history, the critique of abstract rights, the dangers of dividing sovereignty, and the need for a strategic alliance between throne and altar" (14). Beaumont generally meets these criteria, but in doing so also aligns herself with many of the Enlightenment intellectuals so opposed by McMahon's Counter­

Enlightenment. For example, she is particularly dedicated to arresting the growth of

"intellectual and social license," and to the "valorization of the family and history." Like

Rousseau, she argues against the use of inappropriate texts for educating young minds. 13

In a stance also embraced by such Enlightenment models as Locke, her texts demonstrate the importance of the formation and maintenance of religiously moral families, where

"chaque pere de famille etait Roi et Juge de ses enfants" (Education complete 1: 52). 14

She amplifies this belief by declaring that the respect of "les Puissances" (powers, which include fathers, civic leaders, clerics, and kings) is engraved in men's hearts by "le doigt de Dieu meme" (the hand of God himself; Civan 1: 138). In addition, her support of an ongoing unified monarchy was reflected in her writings from the Education complete and

Civan to the later Contes moraux and epistolary novels: "il n'est point de royaume, de famille, quelque grand que soit leur puissance, qui ne touche au moment de leur perte sitot qu'ils se laissent entamer par la division" (there is no kingdom or family, however

183 great their power, that does not border on their destruction when they allow themselves to be divided; Education complete 1: 264). Yet this support is not really different from the positions held by Montesquieu or Voltaire, who both advocated an "enlightened monarchy" in a model similar to that portrayed by Beaumont, providing leadership without dictatorship. Montesquieu argues not only for a monarchy subordinated to the aristocracy, but even proposes giving defined power to the clergy as part of his governmental organization (De l'Espritdes lois 1: 109-10).

It is in McMahan's categorization of a "need for a strategic alliance between throne and altar" that Beaumont deviates from her philosophes contemporaries. Although she embodied many of the new ideas and positions that inform what we now consider canonical Enlightenment thought, including the right to question authority and the importance of individual thought, Beaumont increasingly adopted much of the apologist religious rhetoric emphasizing a society permeated with religion that the anti-philosophes promoted in their tracts, essays, and other writings. Her novels reflected notions of misplaced prejudice against Catholicism, and made ever-increasing efforts to demonstrate the superiority of her faith and its place in all aspects of life. Toward the end of Volume I of Lettres de Madame du Montier appears a concise and unambiguous example of this stance. The Marquise writes to her mother describing the events of a short stay in Geneva, a city that causes her to "repandre des larmes sur le malheur de ses habitants" (spill tears of unhappiness over the misfortune of its inhabitants; 232). What could be the cause of such sorrow? Through a dialogue between this noblewoman and several town officials,

Beaumont tracks the latter's unfamiliarity with Catholic dogmas, confession, and the invocation of saints, ultimately arriving at what she calls the "refrain etemel," their

184 misconception that her genuine and acceptable convictions were not those practiced by her Church. "lis [les Ministres] refusent mon temoignage comme ils ont rejete celui de

Monsieur Bossuet" (they [the officials] refuse my affirmation as they rejected that of Mr.

Bossuet; 234). Comparing her character to Jacques Bossuet, bishop and member of the

French Academy, she infers in the Marquise Bossuet's same goals of placing a Christian king on the French throne and bringing Protestants back into the Catholic fold, as noted

above. Beaumont thus promotes -if quite naively- the witness of true believers who base their affirmation of faith on a Biblical basis for the Church, and she trusts that the leaders of French Catholicism had also adopted this direct, unadulterated approach. Yet when even her knowledge of scripture, which the fictional Swiss officials thought outside the accepted practices of the Catholic Church, could not convince the Marquise's interlocutors to embrace her version of Christianity, she herself could not be swayed to accept their stance. Nonetheless, Beaumont was far from adopting the position of those ultra-conservative members of the Counter-Enlightenment who believed ardently that

"conciliation - what many would come to term moderantisme - was the first step to disaster" (McMahon 158). Her final act was, instead, simply to pray that one day they would find "les vraies lumieres" (the true enlightenment; 235) which would lead them to the true faith they could embody in their leadership as well as their personal lives.

Beaumont was not so na!ve as to believe that the Church was populated with only dedicated believers intent on doing good works for no personal reward. She most assuredly recognized that the Church was subject to misrepresentation for personal gain, and she stood guard against any who misused or tainted the ideal Church and its objective,

185 adamantly denouncing their behavior. In the introduction to the Contes Moraux, she lays out that concern in no uncertain terms:

N'aurai-je de vrais antagonistes que les devots par metier, c'est a dire,

ceux qui ont substitue la bigoterie a la vraie piete, ou par hypocrisie, ou

par ignorance. Apprenez mondains, pour calmer votre bile et vous rassurer

entierement; apprenez, dis-je; que j'ai une veritable horreur pour la fausse

devotion, que je la combattrai autant que I' irreligion; que je la crois

beaucoup plus dangereuse. (Introduction I: xiv)

My only true antagonists will be the professional 'devots', that is to say,

those who have replaced true piety with bigotry, either by hypocrisy or by

ignorance. Understand this, worldly people, to calm your anger and to be

completely reassured; understand, I say, that I am truly horrified by false

devotion, which I will fight against as much as irreligion; I think that it is

even more dangerous.

The Biblical context is subtextual but very clear to eighteenth-century readers, signaling here again the New Testament mindset with which Beaumont formulated her argument, taken from the words of Jesus: "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men's faces ... You travel over land and sea to wine a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are" (Holy Bible Matt. 23: 13-15).

Beaumont's repudiation of false acts done in the name of religion - and of the

Catholic Church in particular, combined with her strong support of the Church as an institution, thus situate her in the center of both sets of her period's most adversarial

186 factions. She encouraged readers to accept the tradition of Christ's church and the personal and communal benefits that it afforded, but to reject the extremes of religious fanaticism on the right and of libertine morality on the left. Thus in spite of the debt that

Beaumont acknowledged to Fenelon for much of her basic material and pedagogical direction, she repeatedly distanced herself from any association with his radical religious views on mysticism or Quietism, 15 rejecting any such extremism that did not conform to the teachings of the Gospels (although she did not outwardly condemn Fenelon's association with the mystic Madame Guyon, whom Rousseau implicitly condemned in

Julie, 531). Whether her text decried the devastation of the Church-driven Spanish

Inquisition as in Civan 16 or the amorality of popular novels with libertine topics in

Clarice and elsewhere, 17 Beaumont's moral philosophy rejected both ends of the spectrum of religious radicalism that modern critics too often identify with partisan eighteenth-century debate.

Another aspect of Beaumont's fervent endorsement of religion entails the familiar idea that eighteenth-century women may have used religion as a culturally acceptable channel for self-expression. Aston documents a loyalty to the Church among many eighteenth-century French women as the result of a conscious effort by the Church to maintain the support of its otherwise dwindling and disenchanted followers. Reaching out to women by reminding them of their obligations as obedient spouses and mothers, the clergy also appealed to a more civic sense of obligation, one that "encouraged them to a proactive role in the spiritual life of their parishes through charitable works" (42). Palmer also recognizes that while men may have felt free to enjoy the sensual pleasures that

Enlightenment discourse promoted, women realized that this was not an option for them.

187 "For women, life continued as submission, and so the protection of religion offered them an option" (11). By couching public acts and initiatives considered outside the normal domestic sphere to be under the protective cover of religion, Beaumont's characters are able to express themselves in works that might otherwise have otherwise constituted unacceptable behavior. Madame Bonne's direction of open air meetings with townspeople in the Magasin des pauvres is completely acceptable because she is helping them improve their religious understanding and raising general moral standards. Clarice's mother-in-law is able to initiate new agricultural practices that are adopted by the local farmers, "soutenue par l'ardeur de ces freres [religieux] zeles" (seconded by the fervor of these zealous priests; 2: 46).

Additionally, and rather paradoxically for a fervent Catholic, her support of women's rights as citizens and contributing members of society never wavered, even before her religious zeal increased. Such a position was perhaps marginally accepted by members of the Republic of Letters, but was clearly rejected by the religious zealots who maintained that women must be obedient to men, who make the rules. It was in reaction to such disparity that Astell wrote: "If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves?" (Reflections upon Marriage, Preface). This combination of radical feminist beliefs expressed by Astell, an Anglican "theocentrist" (Johns 25), and so prominent in the writings of the devout Catholic Beaumont, presents what Barbara Kaltz refers to as

"un dilemme" (Preface 6), one that Kaltz seems unable to explain. Yet readers of her complete works can readily see that it is precisely Beaumont's Christian faith that allows her to place the authority of God above any human authority, whether king or husband, allowing independent women to subject themselves only to divine command. A secure

188 sense of her faith and her intelligence allowed Beaumont to incorporate these two seemingly opposing positions and create a satisfactory middle ground.

The notion that Beaumont also used religion - or at least Christian morality - as a shield of sorts for women is suggested by Stewart in Gynographs. Her argument centers particularly on Beaumont's "thirtyish heroines" (47) who, single or widowed, reject marriage and opt instead for a life of independence often characterized by service to others, a behavior that Steward classifies as "separatist" (48). This intriguing argument finds substantiation in almost every one of Beaumont's texts, where the passion of youth is displaced by the happiness that these mature women find in defying patriarchal expectations for worldly alliances with men as a means of self-justification. The

Marquise in Lettres de Madame du Montier, ends the novel preferring a life of seclusion and good works to marriage with a man who stirred too much passion in her and thus presented the potential loss of personal control. As Beaumont's protagonist explains,

"celle qui n'est pas mariee, dit Saint Paul, n'a d'autre soin que de plaire aDieu, au lieu qu'une femme est partagee entre lui et son epoux" (a woman who is unmarried, said St.

Paul, must only worry about pleasing God, while a married woman must share herself between him and her husband; 2: 353). This option of submission to one authority only removed the dominant spouse from a woman's life, freeing her to make her own choices, as long as they conformed to the highest directives. In addition to its occurrence the example of the Marquise, a similarly defiant action occurs in the Memoires de Madame la Baronne de Batteville. The Baroness, when widowed and pursued by the man she has loved her entire life, instead persuades him to marry her own daughter while this mother,

"en liberte de disposer de moi" (free to dispose of myself; 305) then retires to a convent,

189 leaving only for "la charite ou ses devoirs de mere" (charitable works or her motherly duties; 323). Opting out of marriage, Beaumont's heroines turn to a spiritual alliance with

God, maintaining an independence of action and mind that allows them to create their own "path to integrity and a means of control" (Gynographs 49). Confident in her belief that, for both genders, God is the ultimate and only Supreme Being, Beaumont models women who have a choice, and occasionally choose to submit only to divine authority in response to their Christian obligation, thus finding a release from the servitude that the position of wife would hold for them. Unlike Graffigny' s Zilia, whose choice of rejecting marriage for a life of study and friendship was criticized by the vast majority of eighteenth-century readers and critics including Beaumont, the association with a religious base gave Beaumont's women a socially acceptable means of removing traditional male dominance from their lives, or at the least reworking it to lessen its negative constraint on their lives. Appealing specifically to her feminine readership,

Beaumont offers them both the empowerment of religious oversight to expand their traditional domestic horizons or the more radical path of complete independence for those who desired it.

Enlightenment Social Morality

Although Beaumont clearly endorsed the Roman Catholic faith in its purest form, her writings often demonstrate a rather pluralistic approach to religion, demonstrating tolerance of the views and opinions of others even if the ultimate desire is one of conversion to Catholicism. Like such other Catholic apologists as Louis Racine or Elie

Freron, and also in close affiliation with the Anglican women cited above, Beaumont exhibited a Cartesian need to question and understand fundamental matters of religion,

190 demonstrating "a new form of religious awareness which asserts itself thereafter clearly and confidently," as Cassirer describes the invigorated tone of religious discourse in the

Enlightenment (164). The clearest example of such an investigative approach to faith is found in her longest work, the six- volume Les Americaines. The collection includes a broad cast of characters who range from adolescent girls to Calvinist, Lutheran, Arian, and Anglican ministers and even a Rabbi. The students take on the roles of young but clearly not unintelligent women from the North American territories, unfamiliar with

European culture and customs and trying to comprehend world religions. Again echoing

Reformation attitudes, Beaumont actually reminds her readers that the students are

Protestants and thus allowed to question the articles of faith ("Avis de l' Auteur"/

Author's Notice), another subtle acknowledgement ofthe interplay between Beaumont's more original format of Christian practices and those being advanced by her female

Anglican contemporaries. The role play allows the students to ask the most nai"ve questions they could imagine, questioning dogma, challenging preconceived notions, and arriving at the truth through reason, evaluation, and ultimately action ("penser, parler, agir").

Beaumont's characters in Les Americaines debate broad if sometimes inaccurate representations of various Christian denominations as well as several of the non-Christian faiths prominent in eighteenth-century Europe. Madame Bonne explains the origins of

Calvinism as a sect that could have remained part of the Catholic Church if its leader had not wanted to head a new church (4: 149), and the Calvinist describes the parables of

Christ as able to be modified when "on voit qu'ils sont sujets a des inconvenients" (they appear troublesome; 4: 40. Jews are categorized as demonstrating "une indifference

191 monstrueuse sur les choses qui regardent Dieu" (a monstrous indifference to things that concern God; 3: 89), although the Jewish participant is well versed in scripture. Mr.

Tolerance is portrayed as avoiding disputes at all cost and giving in for the good of all on everything but "les points fondamentaux" (4: 5), and although he often offers a middle ground to the debates, his voice is regularly overshadowed by the others.

Les Americaines is in many ways reminiscent of Montesquieu' s comparisons of religions and their distinctions- both good and bad- in the Lettres persanes (1748) where, viewed from the eyes of the Muslim protagonists, the practices of both the Church and, at times, the corresponding Islamic believers are reported, questioned, and often satirically exposed. Letter 60 from the Persian traveler Usbek to his friend at home addresses the links between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and notes the beginnings of a welcome tolerance in Europeans who recognize that, in order to embrace their own religion, "il n' est pas m!cessaire de ha'ir et de persecuter ceux qui ne 1' observent pas" (it is not necessary to hate and persecute those who do not observe it; 120). Even more similar to Beaumont's text is Voltaire's commentary on Britain's religious sects in his Lettres philosophiques (1733). Praising the tolerance and logic of the Quakers in his first letters,

Voltaire then uses his satirical wit to describe the dominant Anglicans, the severe

Presbyterians of Scotland, and other sects, all reflexively, with the ultimate objective of ridiculing the French clergy. This aim is apparent in the last sentences of Letter VI: "S 'il n'y avait en Angleterre qu'une religion, le despotisme serait a craindre; s'il yen avait deux, elles se couperait la gorge; mais il y en a trente, et elles vivent en paix et heureuses" (If there were only one religion in England, despotism would be a fear; if there were two, they would cut each other's throats; but there are thirty, and they live in

192 peace and happiness; 61). The contrast with the adversarial state of affairs between

France's Catholics and Huguenots is apparent to the reader, and foreshadows Voltaire's most powerful work on religious tolerance, the Traite sur la tolerance a l 'occasion de la mort de Jean Calais ( 1763).18 Although Beaumont's interpretation of that same English tolerance is less satirically stated than Voltaire's, she nonetheless echoes his appreciation for that cross-Channel attitude: "On est moins curieux en Angleterre de faire des proselytes que dans aucun autre des pays protestants" (in England they are less interested in making converts than in any other protestant nation; Clarice 2: 320).

It is clear, however, that although Beaumont's characters also express interest in one another, question opposing viewpoints congenially, and listen to differing statements of belief with consideration, her objective differs considerably from Voltaire's fundamental advocacy for egalitarian tolerance and the removal of Catholicism from dominance as the public religion. Palmer rightly distinguishes tolerance from toleration as follows: "toleration, which is a public policy, and tolerance, which is a disposition of mind. Catholics did not believe in toleration; they held, with the laws of the country, that a non-Catholic had no religious or civil status in France. Sometimes, however, they were inclined to a kind of tolerance" (7). From her dedication - replete with such adjectives for the king as "tres Catholique" and "tres Chretien" - to the actual dialogues between young people and adults retracing scriptural stories and sectarian beliefs, Beaumont's clear purpose was to explore the Biblical roots of Catholicism so that its Christian principles could then be shown as true and applicable to one's daily life. For example, the second volume contains a lengthy discussion of De l'Esprit (1758), Claude Helvetius' essay on atheism, where he theorized, in Palmer's paraphrase, that "civilization and all great

193 achievements ... came from 'strong passions,' of which the two strongest were the love of glory and the love of women" (187). The essay, introduced to the conversation by Mr.

"Belesprit" (Wit), stirs up great controversy among the group members, and although care is given to allow Belesprit to make his points, they are subsequently countered by

Madame Bonne and several students. This sense of subdued combat carries into the next chapter, where the request by Mr. Belesprit to introduce a Jewish doctor into the debate is received with lukewarm enthusiasm from Madame Bonne: "Je n'espere pas beaucoup de satisfaction de ce nouvel adversaire" (I do not expect much satisfaction from this new adversary; my emphasis, 3: 89). The chapter focuses primarily on the Judea-Christian debate, and the articulate rabbi is able to address in detail the numerous Biblical references that arise, countering initially prejudicial comments by Madame Bonne on the general condition of Jews in France. By volume 4, the Calvinist minister's comments have become narrow-minded and foolish, and he remarks that women should be restricted to obedience and submission of their "petit esprit et leurs faibles lumieres ... [a] ceux que Dieu a charges de les enseigner, sans examiner et critiquer leurs decisions"

(small wit and their weak intelligence ... [to] those whom God charged to teach them, without examining and criticizing their decisions; 4: 10). It is noteworthy the minister speaks freely, even if his attitudes toward the authority of man do not receive approbation by the other members of the debate. In fact, as even the Rabbi begins to counter his weak and ill-founded arguments, the logic of Catholicism so important to Beaumont begins to manifest itself in full.

Recognizing the need for understanding and tolerance between religions,

Beaumont's debates nonetheless tend to resolve on a note of disappointment when the

194 outcome is not an auditor's clear conversion to the beliefs of Roman Catholic Church.

This frustration, evident in Les Americaines, also arises in her epistolary novels. The opening description of the Geneva scene in Lettres de Madame du Montier described earlier conveys the spirit of tolerance that all the participants display toward one another in spite of their religious divide: "si j 'ai lieu de vanter la moderation et la politesse de ces

Messieurs, je pense qu' ils ne sont pas moins contents de rna moderation" (ifl can boast of these gentlemen's moderation and politeness, I think that they are no less content with my moderation; 233). As demonstrated above, however, this mutual respect does not keep her from then labeling as false pretenses their opinions of her Church and their preference for Protestantism. It does, nonetheless, position her far from the anti­ philosophes whose claim was, according to McMahon, that "tolerance was only weakness and indifference to truth," and whose religion he characterized as "stern, unyielding, intolerant" (133). While there is no denying the firmness of her Roman

Catholic beliefs, her religion was one of hopeful persuasion accompanied by a clear respect for the opinions of others.

Of course, Beaumont desires that tolerance between those of differing faiths be reciprocal. The prejudice that she notes against Catholicism by the protestant sects in the examples above resurfaces in Clarice, particularly since much of the action is set in

England. There are casual remarks made by English characters expressing generally accepted misconceptions of the Roman Catholics, "ces chiens de papistes [qui] sont bien mechants" (those papist dogs [who] are quite mean; 1: 204), an innkeeper says that a small group of Catholics are allowed to support a priest, "comme ils etaient fort tranquilles, et que dans les dernieres rebellions ils avaient montre beaucoup de fidelite, on

195 leur laissait librement exercer leur religion" (since they were very peaceful, and during

the last uprisings they exhibited great loyalty, they were left free to practice their religion;

Clarice 1: 270). Most striking, however, is the letter from Harriet addressing the hunting

out of Catholics in England that her husband writes about. In an opening statement

supporting religious freedom for all, she writes to Clarice: "Le fondement de la

reformation est la liberte de conscience: chacun, disent nos reformateurs, re<;oit les

lumieres du Saint-Esprit pour interpreter l'Ecriture" (the foundation of the reformation is

freedom of thought: each one, say our reformers, receives enlightenment from the Holy

Spirit to interpret the Scriptures; 2: 84). Yet as the text continues over another two pages,

describing the various sects living in freedom in England, the good sense of the

government, and Henry VIII's creation of the Anglican Church, it is clearly her desire to emphasize the need for tolerance toward Catholics who should be left to live in peace that

surfaces as the true motive behind Harriet's discourse of praise.

Her adherence to the Biblical scripture and her strong support of Roman

Catholicism also determined Beaumont's belief in the requisite obligations of tolerance, charity, and service to humanity that they imposed on the faithful, quite as Paul urged the

Ephesians to live "en toute humilite et douceur, avec patience, vous supportant les uns les autres avec charite" (in all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in charity; Holy Bible Ephesians 4: 2). Reflecting values of social concern also voiced in the themes of such prominent members of the Republic of Letters as

Voltaire, Diderot, and D' Alembert, she tempts one to see in this similarity a simple manipulation of terminology, as Rene Pomeau and Jean Ehrard infer in their analysis of

Enlightenment issues. These critics explain the shift in perception of moral responsibility

196 as simply a name change: "de chretiennes qu' elles etaient, des idees telles que la tolerance, la liberte de conscience, la valeur de la raison contre le prejuge, les droits de la critique, sont devenues des idees 'philosophiques"' (as Christian as they were, such ideas

as tolerance, free conscience, the value of reason against prejudice, the right of criticism, became 'philosophical' ideas; Pomeau and Ehrard 130). The Encyclopedie article on

"Tolerance" links that word with the corollary definitions of theology, morality, and politics before defining it, in part, as something without which "on ne verrait sur la terre que troubles et dissensions" (one would only see trouble and dissent on earth; 2: 335).

Later in the article, the author Jean-Edme Romilly (1739-79) 19 addresses atheism as a hindrance to tolerance, atheism "qui enleve aux puissants le seul frein qui les retienne, et aux faibles leur unique espoir, qui enervent toutes les lois humaines en leur otant la force qu'elles tirent d'une sanction divine" (which takes from the powerful the only brake holding them back, and from the weak their only hope, which aggravates human laws by removing from them the force that they derive from a divine sanction; 336). What the eighteenth-century experiences is an overlap of beliefs with different names, a position that Cassirer might consider "a new form of faith which it [the Enlightenment] proclaims, and the new form of religion which it embodies" (135-6). This "new form of faith" embodies many of Christianiy' s foundational precepts - particularly those of charity, toleration, and service to others- while removing them from the Church's jurisdiction. In fact, recent scholarly publications have seen some resituating of these eighteenth century moral priorities by such prominent critics as Jtirgen Habermas, who commented in an interview that the Enlightenment principle of "universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of

197 life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights, and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love" ( qtd. in Wolinas, 17). The social outreach that Beaumont promotes under the guidelines of Christian duty is clearly aligned with the theories of such "innovative" thinkers as Voltaire, Diderot, and Montesquieu who called for tolerance and social reform in secular rather than religious terms.

In fact, it is less in the basic core of religious beliefs that Beaumont differed with her contemporaries than in her program for their application. As in her pedagogical system, Beaumont approached the social issues of outreach, tolerance, and charity as obligations between individuals who had the financial, social and intellectual means to aid those in need. Promoting such processes as fair pay for farm workers (Lettres d'Emerence a Lucie), job training for young girls in reform schools (Contes moraux), religious training and conversion by personal example (Civan), and health awareness for new mothers including breastfeeding of infants (Clarice), she demonstrated their applicability in life's daily activities through her texts, endeavoring to enhance personal morality and communal well-being with concrete acts. Instead of satirizing the folly of war as in , Beaumont's Civan offers a plan for educating just leaders who would avoid war. Where Locke speaks of a church as "a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord" (A Letter Concerning Toleration 220), Clarice demonstrates how her group of like-minded believers can take that faith and apply it to the creation of a Christian village. And if the dialogue of Diderot' s Lui and Moi, fictional protagonists in Le Neveu de Rameau (1761), deliberates many uncomfortable notions of hypocrisy, snobbism, and other failings of eighteenth-century society, Beaumont's

198 handbooks set similar dialogue into personal accounts that not only detail the shortcomings of such acts as mistreatment of subordinates or frivolous financial habits, but also propose psychological and physical initiatives to correct those uncharitable acts.

Rather than falling outside the canonically recognized positions of Voltaire, Diderot,

Locke, and so many others who theorized a more tolerant and compassionate society,

Beaumont's writings echoed these widely debated theories but with a third step added:

"penser, parler, agir"- think, speak, and act. As she wrote in early in her career, "Qu'ils sachent par votre exemple qu'il est une religion qui purifie les mreurs et qui procure le bonheur de ceux qui la pratique; mais souvenez-vous que Dieu veut des creurs qui s'offrent volontairement" (let them know by your example that there is a religion that purifies behavior and brings happiness to those who practice it; but remember that God wants hearts that give themselves willingly; emphasis added, Civan 1: 191). Whether religion or charity, tolerance or outreach, only through the example of personal actions would the words of Civan- or Beaumont herself- have a chance of meaningful success.

The years that Beaumont spent in England provided her with a sense of tolerance that she found lacking when she returned to France. To her, the English work ethic emphasized the ability to work together regardless of class or social status. "Un negociant fidele et laborieux peut pretendre a tout ici. Le due, le comte, ne rougit point de s'allier avec lui, dele traiter avec distinction, de lui montrer des egards" (a loyal and hardworking merchant can expect everything here. Neither the duke nor the count blush to join forces with him, to treat him with distinction, to hold him in esteem; Magasin des enfants 1: xxiv). This portrait of acceptable intercourse between classes carried through to her pedagogical practices, where her student roster included the young Miss

199 Molly as an equal member of the group of girls in the Magasin des enfants, sharing

insightful comments alongside those of Lady Spirituelle and the other daughters· of

aristocratic households.

Yet Beaumont also supports the idea of class distinction, a position which echoes

that of Locke, Voltaire, and many others who argued for fair treatment of all individuals

yet saw nothing unjust in the separation of classes to ensure the proper fulfillment of

civic and domestic tasks. Her characters note the differences that exist between the

classes, justifying, as in the case of Clarice, marriage with a man from "une classe

mediocre, ou 1' on trouve ordinairement plus de mreurs que dans celles qui sont plus

relevees" (an ordinary class, where one usually finds more manners than in those that are

more distinguished; 1: 208) and citing the ridiculous notion that "une naissance illustre

transmet comme un heritage les sentiments nobles et vertueux qui l'ont produit" (a

distinguished birth transmits like an inheritance the noble and virtuous sentiments that

produced it; 1: 211). Her heroines often refer to servants or farm workers as children or younger siblings in need of protection and guidance. The implication at first blush is one

of condescendence, in the use of such adjectives as "poor" and "unfortunate," or "this type of people." All servants receive considerate treatment from their employers, and

Madame du Montier writes to her daughter about a Marquise who shocks her friend by noting that the bed she admired was not that of the Marquise but of her chambermaid,

adding ')e ne vois pas pourquoi notre orgueil nous les represente si fort au-dessous de nous ... ce sont nos freres cadets et malheureux" (I do not see why our pride had us set them so far beneath us ... they are our younger and unfortunate brothers; 1: 296).

Beaumont acknowledges a separation, but allows no excuse for mistreatment.

200 In fact, class can also be a burden for those on the upper end who desire to reach

out to others with assistance. Lucie describes the weight of this responsibility to those for whom she and her husband "D'etre d'une paroisse, dans les yeux du Providence

Supreme, est d'etre le pere du peuple, leur protection et leur soutien. QueUes obligations accompagnent les grands titres" (to be lord of a parish, in the eyes of the Highest

Providence, is to be the father of the people, their protection and support. What responsibilities come with grand titles; Lettres d'Emerence a Lucie 1: 93). Clarice, who is anxious to participate fully in the country life, is told by her mother and her mother-in­ law to remember her position: "Dieu a fait les differentes places qui sont dans le monde, et veut qu'on vive comme ceux de la classe" (God made the different places in the world, and wants us to live like those of our own class; 2: 110). This was class equality, an acceptable position even for the most broad-minded of the Enlightenment thinkers.

Reform and Utopianism

Beaumont's clearly religious foundation pervaded her philosophical stance on every social issue that confronted her. Not content to form opinions, Beaumont demonstrated again and again her need to transform thought into act, reflection into initiative, and words into deeds. Fervently engaged in her world, this woman of action explored every means available to her to transform it into a better place. From her earliest demonstrations of civic concern and social transformation in England to her later, more expansive efforts to implement the principles of her faith in conscious social measures,

Beaumont never strayed from her basic belief that the work of each individual was found in the emulation of Christ's words and deeds as stated in New Testament.

201 Meanwhile, although Beaumont's sojourn in England was primarily urban in character, the changes occurring in the nation's agricultural and industrial environments could not have escaped her entirely. England's shift in populations from the agriculturally-based countryside to the expanding industrial centers was increasingly balanced by advances in farming techniques that allowed a stronger agricultural sector to

support those expanding urban environments. As Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus have

shown, the commercialization of Britain during the eighteenth century was perhaps staggered regionally but was nonetheless continual in nature across the majority of

England, Scotland, and Wales (Women's History 2). One interesting aspect of this shifting economy was the migration of young women from agricultural settings to cities, as work on the farms decreased and factory or other industrial operations offered them employment. This partial relocation of families created an overlap of the two economies that was new, "a symbiotic relationship ... with both work and workers overlapping, and urban employment helping to support rural families" (Barker, 132). Evidence of this interaction between the two economic locales also made its way into many period novels, and its influence on British writers appears in such works as Sarah Fielding's The

Governess, in which country girls come to the city to be educated.

The industrialization of rural economies and of businesses in general that manifested itself in eighteenth-century Britain was most devastating to women, whom

Hannah Barker describes as experiencing "both a significant narrowing in opportunities for women's work and a lowering in its status" (125). Although the details of that degradation and its true explanation are the subject of debate by modern historians, there is a general consensus that the negative effect of this decline was felt most acutely by

202 lower-class women and their families. Barker notes such critical factors in rural areas as

"," which denied access to privatized lands by outsiders. This practice prevented country women from gleaning or harvesting crops left behind by the farmer, and kept neighbors from grazing their livestock in those fields. Both gleaning and free­ range grazing had been common among country populations, and were significant means of adding to a family's food supply (129-30). With mechanical industrialization and the conglomeration of farms into larger holdings, the land itself no longer provided the communal service it once had, leaving poorer occupants left to find other sources of food for their families. Yet the new agricultural techniques offered vast improvements in overall crop production, allowing the land to better sustain the expanding urban populations.

Change was not only evident in the mother country. Britain's expanding global presence during the eighteenth century translated in many new areas of specialization.

The science of mapping became increasingly important as the names of formerly unknown lands entered mainstream discourse. An increasing number of documents appeared in bookstores for a public eager to travel to these exotic new places, even if only in picture books. Publishers promoted ever new locales for the exotic, and advanced the popularity of such novels as Daniel Defoe's tale of the island castaway Robinson

Crusoe (1719), Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) set in Surinam, Jonathan Swift's

Gulliver's Travels (1726), and other essays set in locations from Japan to America. In intellectual circles saw a parellel increase in more scholarly publications on geography, mapping, and technical topics. Douglas Chambers refers to the use of latitudes and longitudes to plot points around the world, and makes particular note of "the advent of a

203 specialized discourse that only a few could understand" (41). This importance placed on the development of systems for scientific notation of all levels manifested itself in the proliferation of works ranging from Herman Moll's System of Geography ( 1701) to

Linnaeus' taxonomic publication, Species Plantarum (1753). We have seen how

Beaumont herself insisted on the importance of geography with her students (as noted in the discussion of dissected maps and the books of Mr. Paileret in chapter 3 above).

Evolving in London's social world that included politicians and landed gentry,20

Beaumont was at least aware of the transformations taking place in that society, and likely took a real interest in these astonishing developments. Whether directly involved in discussions on topics of civic significance or simply an observer of those debates in which men were "engaged in dispute or at least persuasive speech in a private house in the company of women and children" (Guest 6), Beaumont was informed on topical public issues. She had access to the English periodicals circulating in London, which led her to comment somewhat tongue-in-cheek on her own publication Nouveau magasin

Fram;ais: "Encore un nouveau magasin!" (Yet another new journal!; Introduction). Her periodical itself, appearing monthly for three years, demonstrated the breadth of her exposure and her interests. Its regular features included, as we have seen, an impressive number of articles on scientific theories, economic strategies, and medical discoveries, all written by highly respected French scholars with whom Beaumont would have interacted at an intellectual level. 21

It is therefore not surprising that her writings from that period also examined the most prevalent socio-political topics of the day, including the pressing issues of agrarian reform, fiscal responsibility, and cosmopolitanism. Her celebrated Magasin des enfants

204 includes extensive commentary on the prosperity of business in England, crediting sage businessmen and farmers who disregard social prejudice when the success of their enterprise is at stake. "Les motifs les plus puissants sur !'esprit de l'homme se reunissent done pour faire fleurir le Commerce, !'interet, et l'amour-propre ... 1' Agriculture conduit au meme but, lorsqu'on se distingue en la faisant fleurir" (The most powerful influences on the human spirit- interest and self-love- thus unite to make commerce flourish ...

Agriculture leads to the same goal for anyone who distinguishes himself by making it flourish; xxiv-xxv). In the course of this discussion on education, Beaumont's use of the business model is noteworthy for its straightforward comparison and her ease in adjusting its application to her purposes.

The same can be said of her novel Civan, which- in addition to its pedagogical and moral purpose- also encourages an interest in the political and economic condition of one's country and the world by common citizens and leaders alike. Thus Civan, upon completion of his studies, first takes a whirlwind tour of several major European countries where governmental policies and social conditions are the cause of much debate and reflection. In this way, Beaumont's novel shares much with her compatriot

Montesquieu and his Lettres Persanes, for their piercing critique put in the mouth of a foreign observer. Civan finally returns to Japan to take control of his inherited kingdom, the fictional Bungo, where his just and reasonable policies secure the gratitude of a happier, wealthier population. Restructuring the tax hierarchy, reducing redundant government service to the benefit of skilled labor, and distributing wealth accumulated by religious institutions to benefit the poor, are the most dramatic measures taken by this young king determined to create a nation of hardworking people rewarded with both

205 material and spiritual happiness. The locus of such radical change is, however, safely situated in another time and another place.

As it entered the second half of the eighteenth-century, France was also refocusing its attention on the trades, those professions that had long been the backbone of its economy. Although the French government trailed the British in promoting modern techniques in agriculture and in the production of material goods, the intellectuals of

France's Republic of Letters were deeply committed to bringing such technology and science to their nation in the hope of relieving the suffering of so many French citizens.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this desire to popularize technical know-how was the publication of Diderot and D' Alembert's L'Encyclopedie (1751-1760), in eighteen volumes, comprising a systematically interconnected, rationalist vision of the universe.

Daniel Brewer describes it as an encyclopedia "display[ing] the order and interrelation of all forms of human knowledge" and an analytic dictionary "contain[ing] the general principles and essential details pertaining to all branches of 18th -century science as well as to the mechanical and liberal arts" (448-9). The result was a monumental compilation of information by over 150 authors, a "rational inquiry into all sectors of human activity"

(Brewer 447). Despite royal persecution, the broad acceptance of this work by French subscribers, and its impact on the organization and ultimately the classifications of

Enlightenment thought, manifest the increasing emphasis that was being placed on thought and reason in all aspects of daily life.

Many of the social and political directions charted by Diderot, D' Alembert, Louis de Jaucourt (1704-79),22 and other contributors to L'Encyclopedie were positions that

Beaumont was also expressing in her writings. When she left London in 1763 and turned

206 her literary attention to the writing of epistolary novels, Beaumont changed her environment but not her fundamental belief in the need to express her values through her words and, as was her custom, through her deeds. Living in rural France, removed from the upper-class society that had comprised her circle of contacts, her daily interactions shifted to the bourgeois inhabitants of her village and the common people preoccupied with questions of subsistence rather than notions of existence. Relocated from London's urban viewpoint on questions of education, finance, social stratification, and household management to the rural French perspective on these same issues, Beaumont's stance and, accordingly, her priority for those issues shifted as well. Encountering undeniable instances of poverty, illness, and declining moral integrity, Beaumont responded with practical remedies for improvement, just as she had done concerning education while in

England. Once again she experimented with real-life scenarios that addressed the dilemmas at their most interactive levels, and then adapted those result-oriented models into universally appealing and easily applicable actions prescribed for her audience.

In these later texts, socio-political influences are much more apparent, and the situations of her fictional characters reflect reactions to current events impacting

Enlightenment France and its inhabitants. Her dissections of legal issues significant to women abound in her novels and her handbook-style texts, where her characters dialogue extensively and in technical detail on such matters as marriage, inheritance law, and fiscal responsibility. The burden of unfair taxation on a rural and uneducated population is a prevalent theme in her novels and the handbooks that represented her writings from

France. Finally, the issue of depopulation in the French countryside was of paramount importance to Beaumont who saw there the best chance for revitalization of agriculture

207 and industries that would energize France's sagging economy and, in Beaumont's opinion, create sustainable resources for the nation's health, growth, and moral standards.

"Si les citoyens sont la richesse n~elle d'un Etat ... combien ces causes de la depopulation devraient-elles exciter !'attention du gouvernement?" (If these citizens are the real wealth of the State ... should not these causes of depopulation arouse the attention of the government?; Clarice 2: 63)

Socio-Economics of Survival

Discussions of money and the legalities that regulate it are prevalent in the later texts of Beaumont, and are often tied to the story line through questions of inheritance. In the Contes moraux, for example, the young widow Olimpia disinherits a deceitful niece to the benefit of her virtuous sister Julia, thus ensuring the wealth that Olimpia inherited from her husband remains in honorable hands. As La Nouvelle Clarice opens, the heroine's inheritance of a very significant estate from her guardian aunt leads to trickery by her father. The Baroness de Batteville assists her husband in uncovering a plot by his evil stepmother to murder her husband before he can modify his will and leave his fortune to his granddaughter. Similar situations address both the importance of money for material well-being while also suggesting the difficulties that money entails for those who possess it in excess. Thus, the Baroness teaches her seven-year old daughter to act in charity and faith toward others, noting that "ces le~ons me semblaient essentielles a un enfant qui joindrait a une beaute parfaite cinquante mille livres de rente" (these lessons seemed to me essential for a child who would combine perfect beauty with an income of fifty thousand pounds; Memoires de Madame Ia Baronne de Batteville 1: 135).

208 What is striking in much ofthis discussion is the detail with which Beaumont's characters explain the intricacies of the inheritance process, even if they are not always portrayed as having any direct control over that process. Wills are often detailed by the women who stand to benefit from them, demonstrating a familiarity with the controversial issue of inheritance law and its impact on women driven by the French civil code that privileged the husband's rights over his spouse (Hanley 289). Madame du

Montier affirms this fact in her first letter to her daughter: "le moment du mariage est celui ou le regne des hommes commencent, et ou le notre finit" (the instant of marriage is when the reign of men begins and ours ends; 1: 9). Beaumont's characters engage in regular debate on the repercussions that specific changes in a will may have on the beneficiaries. Most of Beaumont's fiction also has at least one female character whose life is directly affected by a legal affair pertaining to property, inheritance, or taxes. This is the case for the Marquise whose inheritance is contested in volume two of Lettres de

Madame du Montier. 23 Given these repeated references to money, inheritance, and laws, there are two assumptions that the reader can make. First, Beaumont was clearly familiar with issues of money and inheritance from personal observation and experience. Her ability to detail the operations that comprised the many legal situations found in her texts points to a thorough understanding of that aspect of the law and to a desire to demonstrate to other women their ability to implement legal actions on their own behalf, even if her characters were ostensibly uncomfortable with legal matters that they left to obliging male friends or relatives.

Thus the second, more subtle assumption for the reader to make is that Beaumont had identified a double standard that existed for women, who were expected to be

209 submissive, obedient wives under Christian and state laws while retaining what Barbara

Todd calls their " full humanity and moral responsibility" (344 ). In Beaumont, it is most often through the intermediary of men that women are able to successfully engage in legal or any other socio-political actions. Women's perceived frailty was, in fact, the most prevalent cause of their involvement in lawsuits that attempted to force the revocation of a will, as in the case of the women named above, living alone on the money from their inheritance. The wise Emerence, advisor to a small group of young women at her retreat in the country, leaves alone for Toulouse to handle a legal matter brought

against her, yet her fate is secured only when her young friend Lucie's husband intervenes to initiate a series of complex financial actions, explicitly recapped by

Emerence in their aftermath (Lettres d'Emerence a Lucie 1: 44). Clarice's friend Harriet takes several pages to detail her husband's actions on Clarice's behalf, including encounters with a priest and a notary public to draft protective legal documents. Here again, the man is charged with the task in the text, but a woman - in this case Harriet - very capably recaps the events in detailed specificity. Critic Renee Winegarten asserts that such surface comments by or about women often disguise the true intent of their literary discourse. Discussing the Rousseau's Julie and, in particular, a letter from his fictional Claire d'Orbe to her cousin Julie, Winegarten highlights the fact that the letter­ writer both complains about the boring politics of Geneva and then explains in great detail the advantages of the Swiss republic over monarchies in general, underscoring the one that exists in France. All of this is done under the guise of a mere repetition of what she hears her father discussing,24 but Winegarten notes the confusing message to the reader, one she calls "bristling with inconsistencies, obfuscations, and even absurdities

210 (as Felicite de Genlis, no friend to Rousseau, would later suggest)" (5). Clearly

Rousseau's Claire is interested enough to write about the event, and understands the issues well enough to recount them in detail even though the topic is purportedly of little or no interest to her. This description, as in Beaumont's portraits of Emerarice, Clarice, the Marquise, and others, indicates a socially correct deference to men for the handling of prominent public issues, a deference that is underscored by these women's obviously clear grasp of the socio-political systems by which they are governed, the roles of those systems in protecting the rights of the people, and the many instances where the systems were flawed or could be abused. The "inconsistencies, obfuscations, and even absurdities" of Rousseau's texts are in Beaumont's women a subtle social commentary on the duplicitous manner in which women were generally constrained to act.

References to matters of domestic well-being were not the only social topics that

Beaumont addressed through her texts. The importance of advances in civic matters and the technology supporting them became the center of lengthy conversations in

Beaumont's later writings. When the Marquise encounters several Swiss ministers during a visit to Geneva in the Lettres de Madame du Montier, she commends them on "le bel ordre de l'hopital et le soin qu'on y a des pauvres" (the organization of the hospital and the care that the poor receive there; 1: 232), demonstrating her awareness of such public institutions and the importance she placed on them. In the second volume of that same novel, the Marquise and her husband are described as having changed the face of the countryside where they reside, replacing "l'affreuse pauvrete, la discorde, !'ignorance et l'oisivete" (horrible poverty, discord, ignorance, and laziness; 2: 4) with a more balanced community of people thanks to improved working conditions and appropriate wages

211 initiated by this noble couple. Early in the first volume of Lettres d'Emerence a Lucie,

Emerence treats Lucie to a description of the famous Canal du Midi, 25 explaining the technological marvels of its mountain tunnel and detailing the operation of its locks.

Once again she emphasizes the achievements being made in France to improve both its economic and technological status, demonstrating a deep understanding of their operation and of their importance to advancement of the country. Beaumont's writing about these issues clearly made the reading public more aware of them, and perhaps more interested or even engages in them.

It is in the novel Clarice, however, that Beaumont's characters plunge repeatedly into the language of commerce, trade, and economic reform, in this the most socially charged of her works. In what modern critic Alix Deguise correctly associates with the laissez-faire capitalism of tax minister and Enlightenment intellectual Anne-Robert­

Jacques Turgot (1727-81),26 Beaumont's characters call for a more equitable distribution of the tax burden for the people of France. In addition, they reflect Turgot' s position on the free trade of grain, a policy that he would later formalize in his Lettres sur la liberte du commerce des grains (1770) and which is outlined by Beaumont as early as 1754 in

Civan (De guise xix-xx). Recognizing the inability of individual women, regardless of their social rank, to change national taxation policies, Beaumont nonetheless attacked the problem in Clarice by having local landowners whose idle property was successfully worked forego any profits from that land for fifteen years in favor of the workers. At the same time, the regional administrators responded positively to a demand that all surtaxes on increased production be abated (2: 49). Such an initiative offered a practical solution based on available resources, good planning, and hard work. Once again, thought, debate,

212 and action were the way to a successful outcome. One senses if not inspiration, then a convergence of perspectives in evident between Beaumont and the philosophes. In

L'Encyclopedie, Etienne Noel Damilaville writes in his article entitled "Population":

"Quand les be so ins de 1' etat sont ceux des peuples, alors ils suffiront aux impots necessaires, ils seront moderes, l'etat sera puissant, !'agriculture et le commerce y fleuriront, et les hommes y seront nombreux, parce qu'ils croissent toujours en raison du bien-etre dont ils jouissent" (when the needs of the state are those of the people, then there will be sufficient taxes which will be moderate, the state will be powerful, agriculture and commerce will blossom, and men will abound because their numbers always increase in proportion to the well-being they experience; 2: 269). There is no denying the similarity in emphasis that this text shares with the positions that Beaumont's characters express throughout her works.

As part of her desire to reform agricultural practices, Beaumont understood that an essential element in the maximization of agricultural resources was the need to overcome a general disdain for agriculture inherent in the upper classes. This attitude, which Chambers notes in such British authors as Pope and Swift (93), formed a barrier between those with the financial and political power to initiate change and those of the working classes capable of the physical implementation of any reform. As such,

Beaumont recognized, the aristocracy was blind to the potential national wealth that was being overlooked in the failing rural economy of France. Thus Beaumont's Clarice elucidates, "en Angleterre on faisait cas d'un homme pour ce qu'il etait et non pas pour ce qu'il faisait; que le fils d'un Lord, d'un Ministre d'Etat n'etait point deshonore en entrant dans le commerce" (In England one cared more about what a man is than what he

213 does; the son of a Lord or a State Official was not ashamed to engage in business; 2: 239).

Her earliest texts made this point in more general terms; she wrote in the Lettres diverses et critiques, for example, that "nulle profession [est] deshonorante, quand elle tend au bien public. Abraham etait Prince; Jacob, son petit-fils, ne derogea pas en gardant des

Troupeaux" (no profession [is] dishonorable when it tends to the public good. Abraham was a prince; Jacob, his grandson, did not demean himself by tending the herds; 1: 110).

In Clarice, where agriculture was a primary focus of volume 2, Beaumont introduced this issue again with a much more immediate example.

As Clarice becomes familiar with the inhabitants of her community, she meets the adolescent children of a wealthy farmer and those of a destitute nobleman. The young people, initially denied the right to marry because of the class prejudices of the aristocrats, are nonetheless eager to build healthy families, strong economies, and prosperous lands,

Clarice gently wins over these noblemen from the idea of sending their dowry-poor daughters to useless lives in the "Abbayes Royales" as "victimes" (2: 236). Instead she convinces them to allow marriages with the successful farmer's children by making clear that "tout prejuge qui reduit a l'inutilite des hommes nes pour servir l'Etat, etant un prejuge ridicule et criminel, qu'il etait d'une noble arne dele secouer, et que c'etait pour en donner l'exemple qu'elle s'etait reduite ala qualite de fermiere" (since any prejudice that renders useless men born to serve the State is foolish and criminal, it was up to noble souls to dislodge it; it was to give this example that she [Clarice] had lowered herself to the state of a farmer; 2: 239-40). It was, in fact, with these young couples that she set in motion a plan for a new village that they would help populate, a model community

214 designed to create a shared environment of harmonious production, and ultimately to duplicate itself.

Where Britain had experienced a population explosion during the eighteenth century (Barker and Challus, 3), the countryside of France faced a crisis of depopulation

and an unprecedented labor shortage. Montesquieu had written extensively on this crisis in the Lettres persanes, dedicating an exchange of eleven letters between Usbek and his friend Rhedi to the subject. Assessing the situation internationally, the men review the decline in world populations over the course of history (Rhedi claims that the earth's population is only one tenth of what it was in ancient times, 206) and debate the causes of this alarming decline, which Usbek attributes to "celle [la difference] qui est arrivee dans les mreurs" (that [change] which took place in morals; 209). Beaumont was also eager to comment on this issue of grave importance to her, and like Montesquieu provided an overview of the causes of depopulation as she saw them. The immediate difference in the two approaches is apparent in the scope of the crisis being evaluated: Montesquieu analyses a global phenomena and it effects, while Beaumont remains focused the

situation in France and, peripherally, the neighboring countries. By focusing on the homeland, Beaumont kept her analysis at a familiar level for the reader, convinced that, as with her early pedagogical methods, one must make the material accessible in order to attract readers. 27 This process, described by Pohl and Tooley as "modeling, through the local, possibilities for global sociopolitical and economic change" (8), is one of

Beaumont's most significant contributions to the advancement of Enlightenment discourse. She provided real-world examples of methods to be used in counteracting this depopulation crisis. In the Contes moraux, the main protagonist Elise is inspired by a visit

215 to the Hopital General, where sees wasted lives of "fourberie" (imposture) transformed by instruction in such skills as weaving, potting, clock repair, and brush making (2: 269), turning poor, unproductive burdens on society into active members of society able to assume future roles as workers, wives, and mothers. A lengthy discussion in the Magasin des pauvres, one of her most religiously apologist texts, also raises this notion of redirecting wasted lives, focusing here on religious commitments where there is no true calling or vocation, lives which might otherwise provide more skilled (and Christian) laborers for a needy France (2: 349-51). Although Beaumont does not condemn the monastic life, she does condemn the subjugation of unwilling children as a solution to their parents' financial dilemmas, and is very critical of the idleness that replaced the industry of the earliest denominations of clerics.

The most detailed debate, and in fact a primary focus of its second volume, runs throughout Clarice. Here Clarice writes repeatedly of the difficulties that depopulation has inflicted on the countryside, where unoccupied and uncultivated land awaits exploitation for the greater good of a hungry nation. One obvious remedy is to halt the mindless placing of young people into convents and monasteries, "des decharges honorables pour leurs families" (honorable places to unload them for their families; 2:

108). Instead they would be trained as religiously guided citizens skilled in practical employments. "ll y aurait moins de Religieux, sans qu'il y efit moins de personnes consacrees a Dieu" (There would be fewer in the religious orders without there being less people committed to God; Clarice 2: 109). As in the example from the Magasin des pauvres above, she stresses emphatically the harm that such action might cause, both in non-religious behavior inside the monastery and in lost occupational productivity. The

216 outspoken practicality of Beaumont and her characters does not contradict the religious foundation of her philosophy and clearly cannot be compared to such anti-clerical works as Diderot's La Religieuse. Instead, she promotes reasonable action that will result in a repopulation of the countryside emptied of its labor force by fleeing Huguenots, the military demands of the Seven Years War, and the attitudes of arrogant aristocrats and lazy clerics. Even when religious inspiration becomes the primary focus of her texts, as in such final writings as the Contes moraux and La Devotion eclairee, this universal alliance of faith and function is never far from Beaumont's center of attention. The emphasis may have changed in this latter phase of her life, but Beaumont never lost her pragmatic ideology of "change through action."

Utopian communities: Platforms for change

The idea of imagining an ideal, reasonable social structure - or utopia, as it is often known- was a popular one in the eighteenth century. With epistemological root in the Renaissance and Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516), the tenets of such imaginary communities are evident in eighteenth-century works ranging from the popular Candide and Robinson Crusoe to Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees ( 1714), worlds in which

"a mixture of harmony, simplicity, sensuality, reason, gentleness, and meditative calm

[are] presented as a desirable ideal" (Poster 526). The creation of these invented worlds allowed Enlightenment authors to offer conceptualized communities that were, traditionally, remote from the European sphere of their conception and yet connected enough to European political or social behavior to allow for a critical perspective of it.

Bernardin de Saint Pierre's Paul et Virginie (1787) is an excellent example of this approach, set in the remote island of Mauritius where harmony reigns and citizens

217 participate equality in the operation of the state, epitomizing the communal nature of the utopia. Juxtaposing such an idyllic existence against the civilization of eighteenth-century

France encountered by young Virginie, the author allows the reader to contrast the social and moral components of each society and then to draw her own conclusions (although the drowning of the "civilized" Virginie when she returns from France gives significant insight into Bernardin de Saint Pierre's position).

Favoring this canonical vision of a distant and foreign utopia, however, disregards anther distinct category of utopian writings that brings invented societies back into the

European societies that originated them. Early modern women writers, often restricted in their access to resources for initiating civic or political modifications, turned to alternate approaches that situated their imaginary communities at a more local level of state or region. Recent scholarship on utopias as created in those women's texts has begun to move away from the more competitive analytical approach of male- versus female­ authored literature, preferring to see women's writings as offering a complimentary alternative approach to political, economic, or religious concerns based on the female authors' differing concerns, perspectives, and aims. Thus Poster's definition above must be resituated in these women's constructions, which Alessa Johns refers to under the umbrella of "invented societies" (7) reflecting new communities within familiar settings striving to achieve the same objectives of harmony, reason, and calm as in the travel or voyage utopia. The priority for these women was less to expose grandiose theories exploring abstract philosophical questions than to grasp the mundane social deficiencies that affected them. They invented societies that were inspired by their daily reality, then tailored solutions to that same reality. The socio-political issues dramatized in these

218 imagined communities engaged readers at a more immediate level by suggesting modifications to social situations that were within the grasp of most readers, at both the psychological and material levels.

Beaumont's oeuvre includes three variations of the concept of utopia: the travel or voyage utopia, the smaller intimate community with limited causes or interests, and the more expansive local or domestic utopian community. By the time she wrote La Nouvelle

Clarice in 1767, she had already used her texts to illustrate the first two types of utopian

groups. In Civan, as we saw above, Beaumont followed the pattern of her male contemporaries to fashion two remote societies: one designed to educate the young prince,

and the second created by the prince-turned-king as brought his humanist practices home.

The first setting was, as described in chapter 3 above, the isolated school environment that Dulica configured for Civan in France, where she conducted lessons in traditional

subjects supplemented by models of government, military tactics, and other pertinent scenarios. The more canonically utopian world is set in the sixteenth-century Japan of

Civan's rule, and followed many patterns identifiable in the voyage utopias of other

Enlightenment authors, particularly the introduction of European values -religion, commerce, legal codes - into a distant land inhabited by less cultivated natives. In fact, when modern critic Nicole Pohl states that "the model of voyage utopia was not available to women writers" (126), she appears to be overlooking Beaumont's obvious use of this technique in her models of change for European royals in governing their states. It is also of note that Beaumont dedicated Civan to Archduke Joseph II of Austria (1741-90), the

Holy Roman Emperor from 1765-1790, who history confirms applied many of

Beaumont's reforms, including the reduction of tax burdens on the peasantry (De guise

219 xx). This "enlightened" ruler was also an adept of Voltaire, and was know to have been

an ardent supporter of the philosopher's precepts religious toleration.

In other texts, Beaumont's communities are more limited in size and focus,

comprised of smaller groups of like-minded individuals assembling for reasons of

friendship, education, or even financial necessity (Memoires de Madame Ia Baronne de

Batteville, Lettres d'Emerence aLucie, Magasin des pauvres). These communities

exhibit some of the characteristics of a more interdependent society, but the discussion of

the text is generally limited to one or two social issues focused on in this communal

setting. Like Sarah Fielding's David Simple (1744), which recent critics have begun to

examine for the utopian qualities it demonstrates as a "community of friendship and

love" (Bartolomeo 40), these texts of Beaumont's explore the relationships of individuals

seeking a more benevolent world. As noted above, her texts often include single or

widowed women who retreat from society and devote themselves to charitable works

(Lettres de Madame du Montier, Lettres d'Emerence aLucie). The final portrait she

draws of the retired Marquise and her communal works in Lettres de Madame du Montier

is as much a demonstration of that character's virtuous relations as it is an illustration of the actual charitable acts taking place within her new community. In that same text,

Beaumont uses the correspondence of Madame de Montier with a young novitiate to describe another small utopian society, the ideal convent. She outlines the potential for a community of love and support for those members who are sincere in their faith and seek honestly to live in harmony with each other while carrying out charitable acts for those outside its walls (2: 325-35). The reader quickly senses the influence of the medieval

French author Christine de Pizan, whose Cite des Dames was an obvious utopian

220 community built by women under the guidance and direction of religious principles,28 and was a predecessor to the Abbaye de Thelemes, Rabelais' famous utopian monastery by his fictional giant Gargantua (1534). Of more immediate impact on Beaumont, however, was the English author Mary Astell, whose Serious Proposal to the Ladies

(1694) promoted, in "imagination, colorful language, and forceful arguments [that] inspired her readers to action," an intricate model for a female monastery (Johns 26). A project that stimulated quite a following in British intellectual circles, As tell's "Religious

Retirement" (61) was designed as "a retreat from the world" while also preparing women

"to do the greatest good in it" (Serious Proposal to the Ladies 61) through the application moral and religious principles. Although it never took physical form, this utopia attracted such supporters as Defoe, Richardson, and Mary Wortley Montagu, and certainly inspired many female writers who followed - including Beaumont - to consider the possibility of such female-driven religious communities.

Already in her earliest vision of idealized communities, Beaumont provided competent women to initiate and guide the process. These positions of leadership, decision-making, and physical action assumed by so many of Beaumont's leading ladies are particularly evident in her utopian communities. In fact, they correspond strikingly with what Eve Tavor Bannet calls "Matriarchal" roles of conduct, which Bannet applies to women writers who considered themselves and all of the female gender as superior to men in reason, virtue, and other non-physical capacities. They differ from Bannet's

"Egalitarian" women, who saw themselves and their gender as intellectual equals to men

(3). If we apply Bannet's definition, Beaumont's strong Matriarchal hand rewrote the conventional understanding of women's domestic roles in the Enlightenment,

221 demonstrating through her competent female characters a capacity for independent social action in domestic and public arenas meant to become part of the accepted discourse.

Beginning with her Lettre en reponse a "L'Annee Merveilleuse" and running through to

Clarice and beyond, Beaumont's women repeatedly mark the superiority of their gender in such powerful assertions as "vous aviez decouvert combien notre sexe etait superieur au votre" (you had discovered how far superior our gender was to yours; Lettre en reponse 3) or "qu'on me laisse la maitresse" (let them allow me to be the leader; Clarice

2: 203). Far more assertive than Sarah Fielding's indecisiveness (Johns notes regarding

Fielding's discursive strategies that "she harbored profound doubts about her chances of success"; 69), Beaumont adamantly claims the right of women to be integrated into the creative process.

In fact, critic Mary McAlpin astutely observes that Montesquieu, in his De

['Esprit des lois, finds that compassionate and serene women often make more preferable heads-of-state than men, a concept that, she posits, recalls the masculine perspective of the salon in which it is women's calming, regulatory presence that is desirable for guiding men, more so than their intellectual capacity (100). Indeed this notion of the salon as representative of an ideal community was not lost on such early modern female writers as Sarah Fielding and Sarah Scott, who, like Beaumont, created model communities advancing education, commerce, and entrepreneurship. The classroom communities of Beaumont's earliest texts are an introduction to such a concept,29 but her later writings create more advanced versions of this type of society in which learning becomes the core motive of a community that then binds together at broader social levels.

The Magasin des pauvres, presented at the outset as a dialogue centered on a better

222 understanding of Christian values for the lower class members of a rural population, eventually expands its reach to cover improved interactions between members of the group and their neighbors on such topics as training apprentices, the responsibilities of servants toward their masters and vice versa, fair business practices between farmers, and improved agricultural methods. With Madame Bonne competently leading the discussion designed to orient its participants toward a more harmonious, productive lifestyle, opinions are exchanged and methods for improving their lifestyles in family, work, and community activities are developed, providing readers with examples of practical if somewhat idealized applications for their own circumstances.

All of these concepts of leadership, friendship, benevolent actions, and realistic applications, converge in the third form of utopian representation as found in Clarice, her final epistolary novel. Here Beaumont arrives at a comprehensive, logical program for a communal society in rural France, incorporating both genders into its egalitarian social structure. She clearly explicates the framework, whose well integrated parts are designed to serve as a model for its ongoing replication, in a trajectory that Johns calls "hopeful gradualism rather than revolutionary substitution" (140). The fictional community created by Clarice and her mother-in-law in volume 2 of Clarice epitomizes Poster's description above and is replete with detailed information on every aspect of the utopian environment and its creation. It is set forth in the novel with the clear aim of real-life replication or, to use Johns' term, reproduction.

The "systeme" that Beaumont proposes through Clarice evolves slowly, being planned in every detail, and her seemingly limitless "bonne volonte" (good will) begins with her simple observation of her mother-in-law's vegetable garden, a former flower bed

223 converted to the more useful purpose of providing food. The garden was, in fact, a common symbol of restoration and utopia in the eighteenth century (Clark 419). Evident in the settings of such voyage utopians as Bernardin de St. Pierre's Paul et Virginie and

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe ( 1719), those novels depict the tropical environments of nature's unadulterated garden where life is lived simply and productively. One of the most famous gardens in eighteenth-century literature is found in Voltaire's Candide. The hero, back in France with his group of travelers after their voyages across oceans and continents, utters the unforgettable last words that situate the garden as man's most important resource: "cela est bien dit ... mais il faut cultiver notre jardin" (that is well said ... but we must make our garden grow; Candide 195). Yet the most famous utopia developed in this brilliant satire is that of El Dorado, a distant South American jungle setting where "le pays etait cultive pour le plaisir comme pour le besoin" (the country was cultivated for pleasure and for necessity; 105). However, what the reader actually finds is a comic abstract of utopian life with nature used as a backdrop for Voltaire's socio-political commentary, mocking the topics of reform being debated in France but addressing neither the nature of the concerns nor a remedy for their improvement. El

Dorado provokes reflection tinged with humor, but mocks the symbolism of the garden as a source of growth and prosperity, instead casting "l'utile et l'agreable" (useful and agreeable) so beloved to Beaumont, Rousseau, and others, in terms of absolute mockery when he describes the idyllic El Dorado (105).

Indeed, for Beaumont the popularity of agriculture as an Enlightenment theme in

France as in Britain was made even more attractive by the appeal of combination of

"l'utile et l'agreable." Beaumont chose to make her garden a familiar one, placed in the

224 countryside of France that would be recognizable to her readers. Recognizing the effectiveness of small movements in creating change, she left aside the far-flung pastorals of the grand philosophes and concentrated on gardens where she could have a positive impact. Surely inspired by the bucolic descriptions of Rousseau's "Clarens," the idyllic retreat in Julie ou la nouvelle Heloise, Beaumont's Clarice also actuates in a rural community where farming is the common denominator. Both women embrace the challenge of reclaiming the land, of seeing it respond to the hard labor of its inhabitants, and of playing a role in rendering it productive. Yet Julie also has a second, more personal landscape that becomes so significant in Rousseau's narrative, the garden where she and her lover Saint-Preux first kissed, her "Elysium" (353-55). This project for which she is given complete oversight by her husband is, in fact, constructed on Julie's need to repent of her deviation from virtue and to exorcise the old passions that impede harmony, rationality, and order in her life (Weber 75). Thus a garden that was once dry, sparsely shaded, and devoid of water is transformed by human will and determination into a lush, pleasant "desert artificiel" (355). Yet it is, according to Saint-Preux, a place where "on a sacrifie I' utile a 1' agreable" (the practical was sacrificed to the pleasurable;

355), and the reader eventually learns of Julie's smothered but never extinguished passion for her lover. The contrast to Beaumont's Clarice is quite apparent here, for the latter, whose virtue is a cornerstone of the novel from cover to cover, has no need of expiating her weaknesses. Instead she embodies the words of Astell's narrator in her

Serious Proposal to the Ladies, wondering "how can you be content to be in the world like Tulips in a garden, to make a fine show and be good for nothing?" ( 11 ). Clarice, having never turned her back on virtuous behavior, is content with her soul and has

225 nothing to regret, allowing her to find true satisfaction in seeing vegetables in the place where flowers had once grown, embracing its utopian symbolism of growth, reproduction, and fulfillment in its most positive representation.

The focus of Beaumont's novel thus remains one of exemplary living, which includes virtuous behavior and selfless acts that result in a practical solutions responding to social concerns, "change through action." As Clarice assumes more of the daily chores in her new home and learns of her mother-in-law's other innovations for improving the life of her workers - such basic improvements as irrigation ditches and a distribution of

0 tasks in a cooperative formae - she also begins to observe the greater communal need, calculating not only the source of the problems but crafting feasibility plans to rectify them. Inadequate housing and poor hygiene are addressed by raising the elevation of living quarters, rerouting water sources away from foundations, relocating manure piles, or even separating sick livestock from the healthy. Proper instructional schedules address the moral structure of young people, and include religious instruction along with job training to improve every facet of the lives of those involved. Early in the process,

Clarice introduces her idea of creating a model village, "Union Chretienne," in which twenty-nine families would implement all the principles of her utopian ideal and "etre considere comme une seule famille" (be considered as one single family; 2: 96). The carefully structured plan, once operational, she later writes to her mother, would pave the way for duplicate villages throughout France. In fact, according to her

As letters are exchanged regarding the work being done in the country, Clarice's mother, living with Harriet and her husband in Paris, begins her own outreach in the public hospitals of the city, intent on improving conditions there for those without the

226 necessary fortunes to receive care at the upper-class facilities. The two women discuss their fortunate financial situations as a source of joy, enabling them to share their wealth in true Christian charity with those who need it most. As their projects take form, Mrs.

Darby writes to her daughter Clarice:

Si quelqu'un s'avisait de lire nos lettres, il se moquerait de nos pn~tentions.

C'est bien a de pauvres petites femmelettes qu'il appartient de s'eriger en

reformatrices dans un Royaume gouveme par des hommes si sages, &

dont la police fait !'admiration des etrangers. C'est surtout une

impertinence a deux femmes qui sont a peine agregees parmi les citoyens.

[ ... ] Ah! je le sens aux mouvements demon creur, je suis citoyenne de

l'Univers, & tousles hommes, quels qu'ils soient, sont mes freres. Ne

sommes-nous pas tous enfants du meme pere? Comment ceux qui sont

froids pour l'humanite, osent-ils dire l'Oraison Dominicale? (2: 195)

If anyone were to read our letters, they would mock our pretentiousness. It

is left to these poor little women to set themselves up as reformers in a

Kingdom ruled by such wise men whose police are the envy of foreigners.

It is above all an impertinence for two women who are barely entitled as

citizens ... Ah! I sense in my heart that I am a citizen of the Universe, and

that all men, whoever they are, are my brothers. Are we not all children of

the same father? How can those who look coldly upon humanity dare to

speak the Sunday Prayer?

Her religious commitment in the formation of her thoughts is obvious, but the importance of Christian principles is not the only point that Mrs. Darby's letter communicates to

227 readers. In a highly significant commentary on the role of women in promoting change - and on their capacity to implement it effectively- Mrs. Darby notes that those men who have taken the roles of leaders in France and given themselves the status of citizen have neglected their duty, leaving the important job of actual reform to these "poor little women" who cannot even claim citizenship. The task, which in this case falls on non­ citizens of France (Clarice and her mother are British), is thus situated instead as reaching beyond the borders of France in a universal vision enabled by the removal of national loyalty. In this way, Clarice and her mother demonstrate membership in the broader and more inclusive Republic of Letters in which the physicality required of leaders in an earlier, less civilized French nation had been supplanted by the recognition that superiority of mind and spirit were the most critical assets for decision-making. Equally significant in this more universally-conscious representation of society as promulgated by the Republic of Letters was the belief that any improvements to the socio-political horizon could only have significance if they were taken beyond the formative stage of ideas and applied in a social setting, "as a social practice" (Goodman 8). In this area, as we have seen, Beaumont excelled, and her female leaders equaled or - as in the case of

Clarice and her mother - surpassed most contemporaries in creating clear applications for the practical insertion of her theories into daily practices impacting all levels of society.

Beaumont's Matriarchal hand- to use Bannet's apt label- gives her characters the authority to assume leadership when the traditional leaders do not, just as she assumes that role in her own authorial mission.

Socio-political reform is not arbitrary in these texts, and Beaumont's characters do not simply suggest change or even implement reforms based solely on personal

228 preference. Recognizing their limited sphere of influence, they approach reform with a clear standard of viability, focusing on the realistic potential of their projects but continuing to recognize those projects as part of a larger, universally applicable scenario.

Thus Clarice begins with a small project, one village of sixty "Colonistes" with carefully selected assignments, well-calculated financial projections, and even a default plan in case of failure. This step-by-step approach, easily replicable, allows opportunities for the reproduction of her model, in whole or in part, locally or globally. Beginning with the solid conviction that only hard work by all participants -leaders and subordinates alike­ will achieve any positive result. Clarice is determined that she and her husband will be part of this initial group, the thirtieth couple and an example of commitment for all the other participants and the outside observers as well. Voltaire demonstrated just this principle in the final chapter of his Candide, in which Candide leads the members of his group to cultivate their land in a sustaining, self-supporting environment. The inhabitants of Rousseau's Clarens each have their role in the operation of that micro-society, where the former tutor Saint-Preux recognizes the responsibility to work incumbent on each group member, and in a tone similar to many of Beaumont's characters notes "l'exemple de leur conduite est le seul tresor dont ils [Julie et son mari] veuillent accroitre leur heritage" (the example of their behavior is the only treasure of their legacy that they

[Julie and her husband] want to increase; 399). The work ethic, for Beaumont and other

Enlightenment writers, is indivisible from the issues of land reform and depopulation.

The final pages of Clarice synthesize the positive tone of Beaumont's writing as the characters focus all of their attention on future optimistic expansion of their projects, paying only marginal attention to their personal unions with children, spouses, or other

229 personal relations. Clarice joyfully envisions her villages multiplying, recreating themselves in Johns' feminist "reproductive" utopian model. This is not the desperate

Roxane of Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, whose only hope of escaping the patriarchal perfection of her utopian harem is to poison herself. Nor is it the unfortunate Julie, who is never able to atone for her loss of virtue and dies still consumed with the guilt and the passion of that sin. Most definitely, moreover, this is not Richardson's Clarissa, whose virtuous soul is so crushed by evil around her that she too dies, exhausted and unfulfilled.

Instead, Beaumont's heroine ends the novel in the full momentum of optimism, having embraced the idea that change is not only possible, it is possible in a very proximate future. Indeed Beaumont adds a sense of urgency to these proposals, an urgency Poster on "Utopias" identifies primarily with post-Revolutionary utopian writers who thus represent "characteristically modem elements in utopian literature" (526). That rush of anticipation, so vivid in the excitement of Clarice for her villages or in the grateful recognition of the workers participating in the conversations with Madame Bonne, exemplifies the perspective of Beaumont and so many other women who understood that their own condition would also benefit by the amelioration of social and economic conditions on a local, national, and global scale.

Beaumont thus advocated change beginning with the individual - kings as well as commoners - and a humanist approach to improving society, rather than the institutional overhaul that would become the hallmark of the French Enlightenment and its successor, the Revolution. She never tired of promoting moral values based on a strong foundation of Biblical precepts, and consistently encouraged benevolent action expressed in acts of charity, tolerance, and service. Her englobing vision of an activist harmonious society,

230 where reason and respect reign without partisan dominance, is foundational throughout her oeuvre. It represents better than any other image or single text the legacy of

Beaumont's Enlightenment texts.

1 For example, existing English-language editions of the Mag as in des adolescentes, translated as The

Young Misses' Magazine, were published in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and New York in 1792, 1806, and

1818 respectively.

2 Beaumont's biographers all refer to her as needing to support herself financially. Patricia Clancy notes that when the King Stanislas was "more fulsome with his praise than his money," Beaumont left to find employment in England ("Beaumont in England" 196), and Barbara Kaltz comments her concurrent work as governess and author in England, despite health issues (ix). Alix Deguise also attributes her departure for

England to her need to "gagner sa vie" (earn a living; Introduction ix).

3 The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, also known as Edict of Fontainebleau, was issued by Louis XIV and ended the toleration of Protestantism in France, resulting in the departure of thousands of Huguenots to more receptive European countries and to the newly opened lands ofthe Americas.

4 See chapter 3 for a more detailed discussion of her education at Ernemont.

5 This popular text aligned Toussaint with many of the Enlightenment intellectuals, and several essays for the Encyclopedie were taken from Les Ma:urs. In addition to his professional relationships with Diderot and

D' Alembert, Toussaint was the translator of several high profile English-language texts, and did editing for such scholars as Montesquieu.

6 Locke writes: "that the church of Christ should persecute other, and force others by fire and sword to embrace her faith and doctrine, I could never yet find in any of the books of the New Testament" (223).

7 Perhaps the most famous proponent ofthis movement was a woman, Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549), who was active in mediating conflict between the Roman Catholics and the Protestants, and who pushed for the translation of the Bible from Latin into French so that it could be more widely read and studied.

231 8 Even the efforts made by the famous bishop Jacques Bossuet in the 1690s to convert Huguenots to the

Roman Catholic faith involved the dissemination of religious texts rather than actual Bibles, leaving the clergy to actually interpret the holy word for the potential converts (Stanton 360).

9 Voltaire was a significant contributor to Beaumont's periodical Le Nouveau magasin Franr;ais.

10 Sotiropoulos notes that Astell "quoted Descartes liberally in the marginalia" of her Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), an early blueprint for female academies.

11 See chapter 2 for a discussion of Beaumont's separation of the mind and the body in such writings as her

Lettres diverses et critiques.

12 Beaumont would not accept a movement that had broken from the Church of Rome and placed another at its head. She attributed such behavior to John Calvin in Les Americaines, where she called him "le chef d'une nouvelle eglise" (the head of a new church; 4: 149)

13 see d"ISCUSSIOn . Ill . C h apter 3 .

14 Locke begins Some Thoughts Concerning Education with instruction to parents on taking control of their sons' educations by removing them from the hands of boarding school tutors and providing them with strict but loving instruction within the "his Father's Family" (100).

15 Domna Stanton defines Quietism as a "mystical 'heresy' within the church ... which upheld absolute

'quiet' or a passive and permanent state of contemplation [known] as 'pure love' of God" (361). She asserts that Fenelon fervently supported this religious attitude against Bossuet, leading to his disgrace. It was his later works, particularly Telemaque, which Beaumont admired.

16 In the first volume of Civan, Dulica explains the false premise of the Inquisition to the young Prince

Civan: "Tout tribunal qui juge dans les tenebres, et qui rend aucun compte de ses Arrets, deviendra toujours un tribunal suspect" (any court that judges in the shadows, and gives no accounting of its sentences will always be suspect: 219).

17 Beaumont's comments to Monsieur D.C. in Lettres diverses et critiques are an excellent example of her position on the loosening of moral standards to be avoided by popular writers. See chapter 2 for that discussion.

232 18 The unjust arrest, conviction, and execution for patricide of the Huguenot Jean Calas in the city of

Toulouse were brought to the attention of Voltaire who took up his cause. Although his letters were harshly critical of the behavior of the city's magistrates, operating behind closed doors and without proof of the crime, Voltaire's Traite also appealed to the Catholic ecclesiasts implicated in the affair, highlighting the intolerant and unjust behavior of some few that the more reasonable members would certainly not choose to emulate. See also Gilbert Collard and Jose Cubero for details on the Calas Affair.

19 Romilly was a prominent Swiss pastor, and contributed only this essay to the Encyclopedie. His father contributed the essay on watch making, "Horlogerie."

20 Beaumont's students included the Sophie, daughter of Lord Carteret, the second of Granville, a wealthy and prominent politician who served in Walpole's administration (Sheffrin 33).

21 The very first issue includes an article on fresh water polyps by Mr. Le Cat "prononcee dans une des

Seances de I' Academie Royale des Sciences de Rouen" (given in a Session of the Royal Academy of

Sciences of Rouen; 1: 7), followed by an article on an ocular membrane that closes a foetus' pupil by Mr. A.

Haller, "Medecin du Roi, Professeur Ordinaire a Gottingue, et Membre de la Societe Royale de Londres"

(King's Physician, Regular Professor at Gottingen, and Member of the London Royal Society; 1: 17).

22 De J aucourt was the most prolific contributor to L 'Encyclopedie. His over 18,000 entries account for approximately one quarter ofthe content, surpassing Diderot, D'Alembert, Rousseau, and Voltaire, even if those philosophes are better recognized today.

23 Much of volume two of the Lettres de Madame du Montier revolves around the awarding of the estate, its removal through unscrupulous legal maneuvering, and the ultimate reinstatement by the King of Sardinia in whose court the Marquis had served

24 The letter is found in Julie, ou Ia nouvelle Heloise, Part Six, Letter V (II: 500-505).

25 Designed by Pierre-Paul Riquet (1601-80), this 240-mile waterway was completed at the end of the seventeenth century and links Toulouse to the Mediterranean Sea at Sete. The canal remains a technological marvel, boasting a series of nine locks accommodating a 30-foot drop at the entrance to

Beziers, a tunnel through a mountain (Tunnel de Malpas), and an aqueduct. In 1996, it was designated a

Unesco Heritage Site.

233 26 One of the Enlightenment's most recognized and respected economists, Turgot served in various governmental positions, and is credited with coining the phrase "laissez-faire" to describe the role to be taken by government in the management of economics at the local level.

27 Beaumont's Preface to the Magasin des enfants refers to the fact that students are bored by traditional readings that, while considered "des chef-d' reuvres," are too difficult for general comprehension (iii-iv).

28 See chapter 1 for a more detailed discussion of Christine de Pizan and her influence on Beaumont.

29 See chapter 3 for a more detailed discussion of the classroom as salon.

3°Clarice learns of these innovative techniques from a detailed report that her mother-in-law the Baroness has sent to the regional treasurer. Her explanation of her methodologies, her projects, their costs, and their results win her the cooperation of that magistrate.

234 Conclusion

Beaumont's Alternative Enlightenment

Si vous ne formez pas des personnes capables de

soutenir ce bien apres vous, Ia cupidite, I' interet

particulier, viendront bientot a bout de le detruire; et

dans cent anson n'en apercevrait pas vestige.

If you do not train people capable of maintaining this

good after you, greed and personal interest will

eventually manage to destroy it, and in one hundred

years there will be no trace of it.

Beaumont, La Nouvelle Clarice (1767)

Terence Cave characterizes the Enlightenment as "the scientific and philosophical questioning of established principles which becomes insistent in the course of the seventeenth century and overwhelming in the eighteenth" (102). In that view, Jeanne

Marie Le Prince de Beaumont was an Enlightenment thinker in the purest sense of that period's context. As we have seen, Beaumont was deeply committed to the systematic study of value questions that challenged the foundations of social thought, including women's role in intellectual discourse, traditionally accepted methods of childhood 235 education, the relationship of religion and society, and the moral values and obligations of that society itself. Bringing to light the unique voice that Beaumont adds to

Enlightenment thought, this study establishes that her reach extended beyond a simple mirroring of predominant ideologies on pedagogy or on social and intellectual reform to embody that period's understanding of the moral philosopher, a concept far more capacious than our restrictive modern-day usage.

In both the overt and the subtle ways explored above, Beaumont presents her themes in fiction through thoughtful and independent characters whose actions challenge her readers to reflect, to reevaluate, and to reinvent their own thinking and behavior.

Beaumont utilized her texts as instructional manuals for coaching new behavior designed to encourage praxes that might ultimately ameliorate both individual well-being and the general human condition. In fact, a close analysis of her work has demonstrated that, writing primarily to women and about women, Beaumont empowered her largest group of readers to become their own agents of change in forms acceptable in society although not always desirable to all its members. This methodology, while radical for its alternative approach, refrained from any subversive rhetoric that might have rendered it unacceptable or even undesirable to its establishment audience.

This analysis has also affirmed the difference in perspective that Beaumont -like a handful of other eighteenth-century women - brought to social issues as compared to their male contemporaries. Indeed, confronted with the reality of limited access to public discourse, narrow credibility for their work, and their overall subordinate status, women continued to write, share ideas, and express opinions on par with male writers, having attained parity in intellectual gravity. Beaumont, familiar with the works of other women

236 authors who were able to establish personal authority through their literary successes, seemed convinced that reform was best initiated at a level where individuals- especially women - felt empowered to implement change. Thus her texts map a current in eighteenth-century thought that is comparable and parallel to those of her male contemporaries. Her alternative models that occasionally contradict those theories based on masculine perspectives thereby create a distinct discourse in which her independent values resonate clearly.

Vested in the feminist lineage of such influential French women authors as

Christine de Pizan, Madame de Lafayette, and her own examples Anne Dacier and

Antoinette Deshoulieres, Beaumont embraces the notion of mentoring so prevalent in those earlier works and expands upon it. 1 Her handbooks, novels, and essays suggest the advantages of mentoring as it applies to the education of children. However, Beaumont expands the role of mentoring beyond pedagogy and develops applications for eighteenth-century women by demonstrating the potential of such networks of information, encouragement, and support between and among women. Beginning with her first publication, the "Lettre en reponse," Beaumont advocates for women, drafting her text as a call from one woman to another to reconsider her support of any writings that might result in harm to "le Sexe." In this way, Beaumont in fact reclaims the true legacy of the Enlightenment - a quest for knowledge open to all - by inserting women into the debate through each other if no other means of access was available to them.

Using such a parallel discourse, women mentored other women to attain the alternative intellectual authority that the Enlightenment promised to all but in reality reserved for a select few.

237 Having thus opened her readers to possibilities outside the traditionally inscribed norms of socially restrictive thinking, Beaumont's parallel Enlightenment discourse also challenged readers to reconsider their environment by demonstrating how individual actions might begin, gradually, to improve its negative aspects. This praxis-oriented focus was possible because Beaumont studied and mastered the theories of dominant moral philosophers and social thinkers, was able to synthesize from those theories the principles best suited to her particular interests, and then reworked those points in forming her own methodology. Her work in education, for example, drew inspiration not only from the classic structures of Fenelon and Rollin but also from the more radical feminism of

Fran<;oise de Graffigny, Mary Astell, and Sarah Fielding. Beaumont offered her own style of practical moral philosophy found in none of the other authors when, for example, she introduced the use of her wooden maps to make an abstract geography lesson concrete, or when she reworked a folk tale to teach leadership and respect for others.

Beaumont excelled in providing readers with texts that engaged them, keeping their interest long enough to impart practical, usable advice and tools for social improvement. As Patricia Clancy aptly states, "her progressive [pedagogical] methods look back to Fenelon and forward to Rousseau" ("Children's Literature" 286).2 Whether her topic was education, feminine equality, religion, or social reform, Beaumont's texts were designed to engage readers in moral questions and to communicate a clear process for appropriating ideas, assimilating them, and then putting them into action. It is this last element, the "change through action" initiative, that was one of her most significant contribution to her audience.

238 Beaumont further developed the pedagogical principle of engaging students by

adapting the lesson to the individual, a practice that began with Locke and, subsequent to

Beaumont, found its pre-modernist apogee in Rousseau. Beaumont, however, uniquely

enhanced that teaching technique by stressing the additional principle of "change through

action" as exemplified by both her own essays and acts, and those of her fictional

characters. In matters of social significance, she localized the utopian model that invented

distant lands of imaginary harmony, preferring to give readers a society that they could relate to, envision for themselves, and in fact reproduce in their own small or large

design. Redirecting her efforts away from most of her contemporaries' more theoretical

commentaries, she offered tangible materials for interaction while other writers addressed

the ills of eighteenth-century France and Europe with scholarly abstraction. Rousseau's

introduction to Du Contrat social provides his political credentials, but also reveals the

"gap between theory and practice" (Weber 71) that defines so much of his work and the majority of Enlightenment debate: "Si j 'etais prince ou legislateur, je ne perdrais pas mon

temps a dire ce qu'il faut faire; je le ferais ou je me tairais" (if I were a prince or

legislator, I would not waste my time saying what needs to be done; I would do it or I

would be silent; 45). Beaumont, we know, did not waste her time; she just did it. This

was a fundamental strength of Beaumont's authorial and literary contribution and the

antithesis of major intellectuals' abstract theorizing. This principle was quite possibly the most significant impetus for her life's work.

Corning from a remarkable woman of action herself, Beaumont's texts are shaped by her perspective as an educator and an author, as a bourgeois in an aristocratic environment, and as a woman in a male-oriented society. In fact, her interdisciplinarity is

239 a major factor in her work, allowing her to utilize her skills and experience from one

professional arena to enhance another. Nina Gelber recognizes this characteristic, noting,

''journalists were far less solitary than novelists, for they had a dialogue, an exchange,

with their audience" (93). Thus her contributions entail an array of pedagogical

techniques, but also incorporate a functional knowledge of current conditions and

theories of economics, geography, social science, and administrative processes into her

arguments for action in areas of social concern. Her own professional situation - that of a

woman author working to support herself financially - influenced her attitude toward the

importance of personal commitment and hard work as guiding forces for all citizens of

every class and social status who desired a more positive private space and an equally

harmonious public environment. Her arguments stand strong alongside those of many

better-known intellectuals of the period, their relevance adding to the socio-political

debates of the Enlightenment philosophes and members of the broader Republic of

Letters.

Regrettably, Beaumont and the other female authors who also helped voice

eighteenth-century intellectual discourse seemed to vanish in the decades that followed

their work. In her introduction to Tender Geographies, Joan DeJean queries the rise and

fall of the female novelist of the eighteenth century, concluding "it is as if the French

female tradition had come into existence in order to create the modern novel. Once the

genre had acquired the full range of its expression and the way had been paved for it to

achieve in the nineteenth century what is now considered its canonical formulation, women writers became far less prominent in its history" (8). This notion easily extends beyond the genre of the novel and its historically verified popularity to the many forums

240 introduced by Beaumont and other early modern women writers whose investigations into such areas as gender equality, early childhood education, religious reform, and community initiatives paved the way for male intellectuals to act while opening few doors for their initiators. Moreover, the writings of these women often seem to have elicited more fear in men than enthusiasm in women. Women writers' individual works received the harsh comments of male critics (when they were noticed at all, as we have seen in even twentieth-century criticism), and yet could not find lasting public support from a nascent female audience that would mandate their acceptance and integration into the canon and the ideals that were to help found the new laws of the land after 1789.

Straightforward in her beliefs and methodical in her arguments, Beaumont shared her thoughts in texts that read today like play scripts or personal journals, with little regard to how they would stand up to the test of time. Hers were handbooks, manuals to be used and reused, not read and then shelved to become the records of abstract reflection. The practical nature of her information displayed itself in a form accessible to all and without pretense. She was not the author of exquisite prose, nor was her work poetic or lilting. For many, such as period critic Frederic Melchior Grimm, her often unpolished prose was a reason in itself to discount her and her work: "sans contredit une des plus insipides creatures qui existent" (without question one of the most insipid creatures that exists; qtd. in Katz xviii). Fine style was a quality that she recognized in her contemporaries, with whom she often shared pedagogical, economic, or other social theories but rarely shared eloquence. She describes Cn5billon fils as imbued with "des talents superieurs" (superior skills; Lettres diverses et critiques 1: 173), and calls

Richardson "vertueux et elegant" (virtuous and elegant; Contes moraux I; 107). Isabelle

241 de Charriere, an outspoken critic of Rousseau and so much of his theory, particularly as it

pertained to women, recognized the power of his style: "To hold people's attention, one

must know like Rousseau how to spin a web of illusions and to sing them with a siren's

voice" (qtd in Trouille, Sexual Politics 5).

Yet Beaumont was indefatigable in her writings, apparently feeling compelled to

outreach efforts in every area of social concern where she felt able to make a difference.

In the preface to her Contes Moraux of 1774, she recognizes both her lack of skill in the

art of writing and her tireless need to communicate her thoughts and guidance to others:

"Encore des ouvrages de Madame de Beaumont, des histoires morales, des lettres! Cette

femme ne finira-t-elle jamais? ... Freron nous en avait averti, il y a plus de six ans ...

Ai-je obtenu un arret qui force les gens a m' acheter? Laissez-moi si je vous ennuie, ce

n'est pas pour vous que j'ecris." ('More works by Madame de Beaumont, moral tales and

letters! Will this woman never finish? ... Freron warned us about her six years ago ... '

Did I get a warrant forcing people to buy my work? Let me be if I bore you; I am not

writing for you; Preface). Her great weakness was perhaps the sheer proliferation of her

writings, to the detriment of any attention to style or grace, a deficit that constitutes

simultaneously one of her greatest attributes and a probable reason for her subsequent

neglect.

Whereas the emotive, pre-Romantic Rousseauistic writing style enthralled a later

eighteenth-century audience, his model of social organization appealed to readers for its emphasis on domestic well-being and family values, which appeared to give women a voice while continuing to portray those women as subject to innate emotionality that

precluded reasonable thought. Thus women readers, encouraged to assume more control

242 of domestic matters, persisted under a patriarchal dependence that precluded direct

societal engagement, like many Enlightenment readers. In contrast, the model championed by Beaumont to advance socio-political reform at all levels demanded active personal commitment and sacrifice that most men appeared unwilling to allow and most women unwilling to assume. Through her works and the example of her own professional position, Beaumont offered the potential for more than just a genderized basic education wherein the female's instruction merely complemented that of her husband. Further, she exhibited an ongoing confidence in her own system of beliefs that was, in fact, contrary to positions held by the majority of eighteenth-century women, who were often "less occupied with study" and more interested in reading about "amusing novelties" (Gelbart

142). However, although Beaumont sought to elevate women through education, she did not seek to transform her sisters into their male counterparts.

It is therefore not surprising that critic Servanne Woodward sees in Beaumont a paradoxical author who "vindicates women's status by reaffirming their domestic roles" and encouraging them to educate themselves yet reinforcing their subordinate roles to their husbands. Woodward's conclusion is that "in Beaumont's logic, women must entertain their husbands and fuel marital conversations. Therefore, women must cultivate their minds, learn how to be accountants, and read" (10). As we have seen, this is perhaps an accurate abstract of Rousseau's Julie but stops short of recognizing the more expansive public discourse of Beaumont's Clarice, who developed strategies for land reform and utopian communities, or for the mentor Dulica, whose educational plan for prince Civan resulted in significant administrative modifications to that ruler's country.

All of Beaumont's women could envision themselves as equally creative in all aspects of

243 Enlightenment thought, from science and math to the arts, from childrearing to animal

husbandry, from legal notation to legislative reform.

Of course, not all reactions to her writings were negative, and the recurring editions and translations of Beaumont's texts attest to their appeal in France and abroad, from the courts of Russia to the fledgling communities of the Americas. In fact, the final four pages of volume 4 of the Magasin des enfants detail Beaumont's extensive list of

subscribers, and include individuals ranging from "Sa Majeste Imperiale de toutes les

Russies" (Her Imperial Majesty of all the Russias) to the Count of Esterhazy, Viennese

Ambassador, and numerous members of the European upper and middle classes in

between (4: 939-43). The popularity of all of her series is affirmed by their multiple reprints, their almost simultaneous translations into English and multiple other languages, and their ongoing international publication well into the nineteenth century. The preface of an 1818 New York edition of the Magasin des enfants, translated as The Young Misses

Magazine, includes an extract reprinted from the 1757 Critical Review. Forty years after its initial publication, the Magasin des enfants remained a primary source of both education and moral instruction for this American editor, Samuel Campbell, who expressed his opinion through that earlier review.

When it is remembered how much the happiness of society, and the good

of mankind, depends on the education of its individual, we shall be

pardoned for taking notice of one of the best works that has been written

to that end; since, however trifling it may at first appear, it is certainly

important in the main ... Here we find the useful and agreeable happily

244 blended, a short and clear abridgement of sacred and profane history, and

some lessons in geography. (ii)

Reprints of this text and others by multiple American publishers continued well into the century, and Kaltz notes that updated versions (with corrections to the sections on geography, physics, and natural science in particular) and reprints were ongoing in

France throughout the nineteenth century. One version, for example, was reprinted thirteen times between 1835 and 1887, and a French education official called for its continued presence in children's libraries in his 1881 study of women educators (Kaltz

30-1). By authoring the immensely popular handbooks of the Magasins series, Beaumont entered the growing public debate on the education of children and young girls in particular and remained well integrated in the pedagogical mainstream for decades.

Beaumont's works spread inside and outside of France as part of the religious surge of the early nineteenth century. McMahon describes ultra-conservative Catholics fighting what they perceived as the infiltration of eighteenth-century immorality into the

Restoration period, thus responding to the continuing presence of such authors as

Voltaire and Rousseau and the increasing presence of Protestant sects throughout France with their own concerted effort to publish their own more select books "aimed at protecting the faithful and reining in the errant" (McMahon 176). The post-Revolutionary rise of religion accounted for a flurry of reprints of several of Beaumont's more instructionally-oriented texts in the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, previously published works were already in the archives and partial property of printers, and these

"acclaimed works from the past offered a steady source of income and involved little

245 commercial risk" (Kay et al. 199), an attractive incentive for all parties to continue with

their production and circulation.

Given such apparent and ongoing popularity of at least her educational texts

during the century following her death, her current absence from all modern reading lists,

library catalogs, and even scholarly inventories remains puzzling. Fundamentally, it is

perhaps Beaumont's very questioning of the canon of traditional feminine behavior that

contributed to her elimination from the anthologies of texts of the Enlightenment in

subsequent periods. Those same anti-philosophes who fought for a return to a fervent

adherence to Catholicism also maintained their strident belief in "the inherent inferiority

of women, or at least on their starkly different prerogatives" (McMahon 135) intrinsic to their lower socio-political status. Generally speaking, historians agree that much of

feminist writing was curtailed after the French Revolution (Johns 161). Critical texts looking back on that period, such as those by Saint-Beuve or the Goncourt brothers (see discussion in chapter 1) undermined the value of novels written by women. Moreover,

the increasing attention of government agencies on standardizing educational practices

and secularizing schools, a movement that peaked with the measures implemented by

Jules Ferry in 1879, did little to promote interest in Beaumont's religious scenarios,

private classroom settings with individualized lessons, and group dialogue, regardless of the recognized pedagogical environment they championed. 3

Yet Beaumont's strong sense of individual responsibility, joined with recognition of feminine equality, led to the development of a system that would guide her readers for generations. She figures as a predecessor to such later eighteenth-century educators as

Stephanie de Genlis and Louise d'Epinay, whose Les Conversations d'Emilie (1773)

246 earned her the Montyon Prix d'Utilite for education from the French Academy in 1783

(Trouille 95). Beaumont's stance on women's intellectual capacities also foreshadowed the writings of such nineteenth-century philosophers as Mary Wollstonecraft and John

Stuart Mill, both of whom would argue for the recognition of equal rights in marriage, politics, and professional opportunities.

The result is an author who is neither Counter-Enlightenment nor anti­ philosophes. She is not against but rather for the causes that will recognize women's rights, improve childhood education, ameliorate deteriorating morals, and develop the

French nation and its people. Beaumont challenged a nascent female audience to actively participate in the intellectual thought and debate of their society, and used her real-world experience to develop a pedagogical methodology founded on the ideals of thought, debate, and action (''penser, parler, agir"). A Cartesian insistence on the separation of mind and body informed much of her argument in favor of women's intellectual capacity, and carried through to her discussion of such socio-political topics as women's equality, agrarian reform, religious tolerance, and social stratification. Not just a gatekeeper of information or a synthesizer of male-produced theories on education and other issues of social concern, she was rather an innovative thinker advancing active, personal commitment to public issues at all levels regardless of gender or social status. Also, promoting theories rooted in the mentoring of women by women as a means of personal realization, Beaumont further advanced French Enlightenment universalism through debate, reason, and action, all of which her readers might apply to the dominant discourse with the same beneficial results.

247 It has been the aim of this study to "ask new questions, to interrogate images ... differently, perhaps with the possibility of gaining more illuminating answers" (Guest 4), to situate the ceuvre of Beaumont in the general scholarship on eighteenth-century thought. Its purpose has been to examine her contribution to the period as a progressive thinker in the areas of social concern that preoccupied many of her contemporaries, delving into her work to evaluate her stances on those issues and their place in the larger

Enlightenment discourse. As such, this study has touched only a small aspect of

Beaumont's role as an influential member of the Republic of Letters, and serves as a continuation in the larger process of uncovering this woman and her work. Other aspects of Beaumont's life and work, such as an in-depth examination of her reception during her lifetime, or an extensive analysis of her connections with other period figures of importance, remain to be developed. French historians- Artigas-Menant in particular­ have begun to investigate official records and her correspondence with such intimates as

Tyrrell and Lady Pomfret to verify biographical information and track more precisely the physical interactions of Beaumont with her family and friends. Evaluations of her work in children's literature are surfacing as part of period studies in that increasingly popular topic of early modern research, as evidenced by the work of Hearne and Raynard.

Nonetheless, there remains much to be done to further extricate the significant stances and directions of this author and her writings, still often eclipsed beneath references that are only now being uncovered through historical research on that period.

As the reception of her work in France, England, and beyond is further evaluated, and researchers continue to connect Beaumont with the Enlightenment debates that dominated her age, the importance of this extraordinary woman as an author, a woman,

248 and an intellectual contributor to her period and its legacy, will only continue to grow in our assessment of both the Enlightenment and women's history.

1 See chapter 2 for a discussion of Beaumont's reference to Dacier and Deshoulieres.

2 Servanne Woodward, in her Preface to the 1997 anthology Altered Narratives, describes Beaumont as having "paid lip service to Rousseau while closely following precepts formulated by Fenelon- apparently more conservative than her contemporaries" (9). It is apparent that Woodward has not been exposed to the full gamut of Beaumont's theories, or she would certainly have realized that her works preceded those of

Rousseau and, in fact, were equally radical for the period in their rejection of sterile training methods or no training at all.

3 Jules Ferry (1832-93), first as Minister of Public Education and then as Prime Minister, fought to eliminate religiously affiliated teachers in public schools , and to make civic education free and mandatory for all French children under the age of fifteen.

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