Prendre modèle sur Télémaque: The Fénelonian Underpinnings of ‘Cultural Policy’ at the Court of Philip V of Spain Jorge Fernández-Santos Ortiz-Iribas/Sara Muniain Ederra*

Fénelon’s influence on his disciple Philip V of Spain (r. 1700–1746) calls for careful reassessment. According to the royal tutor, Christian princes were answerable to their personal conscience in matters both private and public. Yet a Fénelonian imprint can be traced not only in the decisive place Philip V reserved for his conscience, but also in the progressive, ‘critical’ cultural policy he promoted as protector of the arts and sciences and in policies designed to encourage population growth and agriculture and curb idle- ness, thereby asserting the vital importance of the Crown in shielding the humble against the arbitrariness of the mighty.

I. Fénelon’s Other Royal Disciple Scholars interested in Fénelon’s political ideas and influence have invariably privileged his close relationship with his star pupil, Louis de Bourbon, Duke of Burgundy. It is widely assumed that the education of the heir presump- tive to the French throne absorbed Fénelon’s attention while the instruction of Louis’s two brothers, Philip, Duke of Anjou, and Charles, Duke of Berry, may have been marred by the reverence instilled in the younger siblings for Louis’ droit d’aînesse. Yet in an age in which the long-term survival of children of all social ranks was a source of deep concern, Fénelon was no doubt acutely aware that the education of the three sons of the Grand Dauphin – who after all constituted with their father the only legitimate offspring of Louis XIV – was a most delicate affaire d’État. What is more, the Grand Dauphin’s rights of succession to the Spanish composite monarchy, which he held from his Habsburg mother and grandmother, would prove decisive should the ailing Charles II, King of Spain, die without issue. In 1689, the devout and incorruptible Paul de Beauvilliers, Duke of Saint-Aignan, was appointed gouverneur des enfants de France. Fénelon, who was the spiritual counsellor of Beauvilliers and his wife Henriette-Louise Colbert, had written for the couple’s many daughters his first published book, the Traité de l’éducation des filles (1687), which earned him a reputation for pedagogical acumen and moral probity.1 Moreover, Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s

* The French phrase is taken from a much-quoted letter of 1701 addressed by Élisa- beth-Charlotte, Duchess of Orléans, to her aunt Sophie of the Palatinate. Élisabeth- Charlotte, best known as Madame Palatine, commented on the wish of her great- nephew Philip V of Spain to model himself after Fénelon’s Telemachus (see notes 47 and 48). – Jorge Fernández-Santos’s current research is co-funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Social Fund (project RYC-2009-05346). Sara Muniain of the Universidad San Jorge wishes to 130 Jorge Fernández-Santos Ortiz-Iribas/Sara Muniain Ederra morganatic wife, was among the few but very influential courtiers to seek spiritual guidance from the future Archbishop of Cambrai, and it was largely to her influence and to Beauvilliers’s friendship that Fénelon owed his pres- tigious appointment as précepteur of the Duke of Burgundy. Before delivering his acceptance speech at the Académie française on 31 March 1693, Fénelon was, quite appropriately, introduced as précepteur of both royal dukes, Bur- gundy and Anjou. In praising the Académie’s founder, Richelieu, Fénelon did not pass up the opportunity to highlight the cardinal’s role in laying down for France the foundations of a “power greater than all others” at- tained by delivering daily strikes to the “imperious House of Austria”.2 Such a lesson would no doubt resonate with his royal pupils, especially with Philip who seven years later, in 1700, was to ascend the Spanish throne as desig- nated heir of his great-uncle Charles II and was to prove his mettle against a Habsburg rival claimant, the Archduke Charles of Austria. On 21 August 1690, the six-year-old Philip was put under the charge of the gouverneur Beauvilliers and the précepteur Fénelon and a team that included the abbot Claude Fleury and Fénelon’s own confessor, the Jesuit priest Lou- is Le Valois. Many historians have cast the lasting influence of such an edu- cation in a decidedly negative light.3 Apparently, Philip V’s uxorial character and his overbearing moral scruples might derive from Fénelon’s insistence on the illicitness of intercourse out of wedlock and on the crucial im- portance of an exacting daily examination of conscience.4 From this charac-

acknowledge funding from the project ‘El discurso de la modernidad’ (HAR-2010- 16277) led by Carlos Chocarro Bujanda. 1 Fénelon, Œuvres, ed. by Jacques Le Brun, 2 vols. (Paris 1983–1997), I, pp. 89–171. 2 Fénelon, Œuvres, I, pp. 531–539. 3 P. Voltes Bou, Felipe V fundador de la España contemporánea (Madrid 1991), pp. 11, 122– 123, who lays stress on the small-mindedness and moral scrupules of Philip V, points out that Fénelon instilled in the three French princes ‘the idea that one’s conduct ought to be shaped by religious fervour’. Along the same lines, Carlos Martínez Shaw and Marina Alfonso Mola, Felipe V (Madrid, 2001), pp. 26–27, blame Fénelon for the indoctrination of his pupil, which resulted in a ridiculously ‘narrow and scrupulous conscience’. For an overview of the various biographies of the monarch, see Ibid., pp. 7–20. According to Luciano de Taxonera, Felipe V fundador de una dinastía y dos veces rey de España (Barcelona, 1942), pp. 40–43, the morally exacting teachings of Fénelon curtailed Philip’s initiative for life. 4 After wrongly stating that Philip ‘n’eut pas droit au bel enseignement du futur achevêque de Cambrai’, Pierre Erlanger, Philippe V d’Espagne. Un roi baroque esclave des femmes (Paris, 1978), pp. 19f., puts the blame on Beauvilliers for raising the Duke of Anjou ‘dans une ignorance totale, une foi superstitieuse où la terreur de l’enfer tenait la première place’. It is no wonder Erlanger should add that ‘Ses éducateurs lui ap- prirent donc la soumission avant toutes choses’ in order to lay the grounds for the later psychological characterization of Philip as a slave to his two wives.