The Letters of The Duchesse d’Elbeuf: Hostile Witness to the French Revolution by Colin Jones, Simon Macdonald, and Alex Fairfax-Cholmeley has recently published in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series. This book features previously unpublished letters written by the duchesse d’Elbeuf which offer a vivid and exciting hostile account of the French Revolution and the Terror. In this blog post, we are introduced to the duchesse d’Elbeuf, the work of bringing together these new sources, and this latest publication in the series.
Our new book centres on six notebooks confiscated by the state during the French Revolution and which have sat, largely undisturbed, in the police archives ever since. They are filled with the scrawled handwriting of one of the richest women in eighteenth-century France, the duchesse d’Elbeuf. We provide the first full transcription of her notebooks and this has allowed us to fix scholarly attention on the duchess for the very first time. Her extensive writing, framed as a record of a correspondence with an unknown female friend but perhaps also functioning as a form of diary or tool for personal reflection, is a distinctive and important addition to the list of contemporary chroniclers of the French Revolution and the quotidian experience of revolution. As a devout, elite, female counter-revolutionary observer she leads us through the tumult of late 1788 to early 1794 with a forthright, multi-faceted hostility to the revolutionary process. Her writing also draws on three distinct geographies of revolutionary experience: an exclusive residence in the heart of Paris; provincial life on her estate at Moreuil in Picardy; and a spell of temporary emigration in Tournai. Quite simply, there is no other French Revolutionary witness quite like her.
As a scholarly edition, this book provides a full transcription of the notebooks (unfortunately, we know that a further twenty notebooks, potentially covering several earlier decades of the duchess’s life, were confiscated but subsequently discarded, lost or destroyed). This was a painstaking process because although the duchess could be an astute observer, she often did not take the same care with her grammar or spelling. Likewise, she clearly felt that writing accessories were an unnecessary expense, even before her finances started to take a significant hit as the Revolution’s attacks on noble status and property escalated, and so the handwriting can tend towards illegibility. Our book interweaves two distinct parts of the notebook series: four notebooks contain a total of sixty-nine letters spanning 13 December 1788 to 6 November 1793; the other two notebooks are made up of note-form entries which appear to record some of the key information in preparation for drafting the letters themselves. In our introduction we interrogate the letter format of this source because it is unusual and intriguing. If these are copies of letters sent to the duchess’s unnamed friend, then who might be the intended target? The counter-revolutionary tone and content would also have made such correspondence an increasingly risky enterprise, and yet there is evidence from elsewhere that the duchess was prepared to take political risks even while living a stone’s throw from the centre of revolutionary government in Paris. Another possibility – that this was always (or became) a private record – would have been an extraordinary innovation for a woman of her generation. These different interpretative frames all show the value of the duchess’s writing for our broader understanding of eighteenth-century epistolary culture.
Our book also provides a biography of the duchess, alongside an analysis of the Revolutionary history she has left us. The duchess’s pre-revolutionary life, reconstructed from a variety of archival sources in the regrettable absence of her notebooks from any of this period, is a case study in the construction and consolidation of noble status and wealth in eighteenth-century France. Childless and already twice a widow, the duchess dedicated much of her energy from the mid-1760s onwards to the successful advancement of her extended family, via marriage and the astute management of her own wealth. Indeed, when we finally have access to her own voice (in December 1788 via the first surviving notebook) she presides, aged eighty-one, over an impressive network of family patronage and can draw on a vast annual income of as much as 200,000 livres. From this pinnacle of French society, the duchess then provides us with a unique account of a revolutionary dynamic which she came to openly deride and despise – but which left her family empire in tatters, goaded her into a temporary exile she came to regret, and saw her live out her final months in uncomfortable proximity to the very revolutionaries she held responsible for destroying the religious and social underpinnings to the France she still held dear.
This account can now be read in full. Alongside our book with the French transcription, a sister website contains a curated selection of translated extracts with searchable text and related content: https://revolutionaryduchess.exeter.ac.uk. We hope people will enjoy both versions of a remarkable voice from the French Revolution.
– Alex Fairfax-Cholmeley (University of Exeter), Colin Jones (Queen Mary University of London & University of Chicago), and Simon Macdonald (University College London)
The Letters of The Duchesse d’Elbeuf: Hostile Witness to the French Revolution is part of the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, published in collaboration with the Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford.
Visit the book’s accompanying website which provides free public access to extensive extracts (never previously translated into English) from the duchesse d’Elbeuf’s notebooks.
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