Political Ideas of Enlightenment Women

Virtue and Citizenship

Lisa Curtis-Wendlandt, Paul Gibbard, Karen Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472409539
• eBook ISBN: 9781317078753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: Literature

This edited collection showcases the contribution of women to the development of political ideas during the Enlightenment, and presents an alternative to the male-authored canon of philosophy and political thought. Over the course of the eighteenth century increasing numbers of women went into print, and they exploited both new and traditional forms to convey their political ideas: from plays, poems, and novels to essays, journalism, annotated translations, and household manuals, as well as dedicated political tracts. Recently, considerable scholarly attention has been paid to women's literary writing and their role in salon society, but their participation in political debates is less well studied. This volume offers new perspectives on some better known authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, as well as neglected figures from the British Isles and continental Europe. The collection advances discussion of how best to understand women's political contributions during the period, the place of salon sociability in the political development of Europe, and the interaction between discourses on slavery and those on women's rights. It will interest scholars and researchers working in women's intellectual history and Enlightenment thought and serve as a useful adjunct to courses in political theory, women's studies, the history of feminism, and European history.

PART I
Women’s Political Ideas in Continental Europe

Chapter 1
Emilie Du Châtelet’s Views on the Pillars of French Society: King, Church, and Family

Judith P. Zinsser

Introduction

France’s rules of censorship in the eighteenth century were simple. The royal garde des sceaux [Keeper of the Seals] instructed his agents to seek out and confiscate any writings that challenged the pillars of state: the king, the Church, and the family. ‘Family’ meant not only the implicit patriarchy of the family unit (the king was, in fact, often portrayed as the father of his subjects) but also the whole hierarchy of families with the haute noblesse at its highest level, the barbarous ‘rabble’ scrambling to serve their betters at its base. The philosophe Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet (1706–1749), as the daughter of the Baron de Breteuil and the wife of a nobleman descended from one of the first families of Lorraine, stood close to the top of this social edifice.¹ Yet everything she wrote that related to the three protected institutions would have been condemned by the royal censors, then seized and burned in the Place des Grèves – the usual fate for publications deemed injurious to the French polity.

Du Châtelet did not shy away from controversy. She claimed victory in her debates with the eminent physicists of France and England over the correct formula for mechanical force, and her exchange of pamphlets with the perpetual secretary of the French Royal Academy of Sciences settled her reputation as a member of the ‘Republic of Letters’. However, she would not have described herself as a rebel, nor the political comments scattered through her works as potentially revolutionary. Unlike many other women discussed in this collection, Du Châtelet never formulated a distinct, coherent theory of politics, nor did she belong to the forerunners of those who made a systematic investigation of the political significance of sexual difference.² Du Châtelet accepted the patriarchal restrictions of her day: that many of her choices required her husband’s permission; that she could not travel to England without him. She accepted societal constraints: that, as a woman, she ‘was excluded from every sort of glory’ open to men, as generals, government ministers, and ambassadors. She chafed, however, at ‘the full weight of prejudice’ that excluded women ‘so universally from the sciences’, and believed that through study she (and by implication other women in similar circumstances) could overcome the disability of their sex. Study, she argued in her Discours sur le bonheur [Discourse on Happiness], could bring fame to a woman as surely as other avenues brought fame to men.³ Like other European women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, she protested at the state of women’s education. Seemingly born only to deceive, women were allowed no other way to use their intelligence. In an early draft of her translator’s preface to The Fable of the Bees (1714; the work of Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch Huguenot émigré living in England), she asserted that if she were king, she would establish a ‘collège’ for women. In the final version, using the language of the new natural philosophy, she imagined an ‘experiment in physics’ which ‘would allow women to share in all the rights of humanity, and most of all those of the mind’.⁴ Her remedy in her own lifetime was to educate herself. She became her own successful scientific experiment.⁵

With the constraints and restrictions of womanhood came duties and responsibilities. Practically, like other women of her rank, Du Châtelet played an active role in the political and economic life of the new family that she and her husband created by marrying in 1725. While he was away at the numerous wars of the mid-eighteenth century, she ran their estates – centred in Champagne, but with outlying holdings in Normandy and across the border in Flanders. It was she who made decisions in the lengthy litigation involved with inheritance of his Flemish lands and routinely supervised the household as it moved between Paris, Versailles, Brussels, and her husband’s chateau, Cirey. Du Châtelet herself came from a family with close ties to King Louis XIV and his queen. The titular head of the Breteuil family became a government minister to Louis XV, and remained an advisor in the queen’s household. Other cousins served as ambassadors and army officers. These connections – and the support of her relative by marriage Louis François Armand Du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, one of Louis XV’s closest friends – gave her clear access to the intricate political world of favour and patronage. She played these connections astutely and persistently. She won advancement for her husband and protection for her lover and companion Voltaire, and secured appropriate futures for her son and daughter. Her son, Florent Louis, as heir to such an illustrious and noble family, served in the royal army; and later, long after his mother’s death, as an ambassador and finally as an advisor to Louis XVI. Her daughter, Gabrielle Pauline was married into the Neapolitan papal nobility and rose to be principal lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Naples. Though as a woman Du Châtelet was in theory marginal to the political, economic, and religious institutions of her male-governed society, she enjoyed its privileges and benefits and never doubted her right to comment on its foibles or to discern and describe its natural laws, however much they might challenge the accepted ‘trinity’ of king, Church, and family.

What then were Du Châtelet’s ideas about government, in its relation to the economy and society as a whole? What was her political philosophy? To answer these questions, to place her within the history of political theory, it is necessary to examine four of her writings. First, she worked from 1734 to 1736 on her free translation of The Fable of the Bees; when she finished this project, there was her ‘Translator’s Preface’ and twelve added chapters which gave her version, not of the verse Fable itself, but of the ancillary material Mandeville had included: his ‘Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue’ and eleven of the ‘Remarks’ he wrote to explain and expand upon phrases in the poem to his English audience. Second, in 1740 Du Châtelet published her Institutions de physique [Foundations of Physics], a study of metaphysics, philosophy, mathematics, and mechanics: her original synthesis of works by René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, and Isaac Newton. Of significance to an understanding of her views on politics is a chapter entitled ‘De la liberté’ [‘Of Free Will’], planned for the Institutions but never included.⁶ Third is her two-volume Examens de la Bible [Examinations of the Bible], which she had begun with Voltaire at Cirey and completed in the early 1740s. Fourth among the works relevant to Du Châtelet’s place in the history of political theory is her Discours sur le bonheur (1747–1748), again a revision and expansion of an earlier project.

Of these writings related to her ideas on king, Church, and family, only the chapter in the Institutions on the nature of God circulated freely in a published text. The others, because of their unorthodox views, she allowed to be read only in manuscript. They were part of an extensive traffic in clandestine texts in the first half of the eighteenth century: books and pamphlets copied and recopied, passed from hand to hand, to evade confiscation or condemnation by the royal censors and their agents.⁷ Like many of her intellectual contemporaries in early Enlightenment France, Du Châtelet adhered to the letter if not the spirit of laws against free expression. In her search for what she distinguished as ‘truth’, she perceived herself as outside and above the royal restrictions, just as the same quest justified her daring disregard of societal constraints imposed on her sex.

Uniting these apparently disparate texts in philosophy, science, and metaphysics was a very characteristic eighteenth-century assumption of their interconnectedness, even if they are in our time established as separate disciplines and ways of thinking. For Du Châtelet, as for Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis and her other philosophe mentors, ‘several truths of Physics, Metaphysics and Geometry are obviously interconnected.’⁸ Geometry, in the broad sense of mathematics, was the key to all underlying certainty: the one true ‘science’ as that term is understood today. She often used such mathematical allusions and comparisons to explain and to stamp with authority her more weighty philosophical statements. For example, searching for a way to describe the nature of God’s power to choose, she used the geometrical example of a circle to explain his relationship to the creation of matter. The essences of things are fixed and cannot depend on the will of their Creator, just as ‘the essence of a circle consists of a line of which all the points are equally distant from another point that one calls the centre.’ One cannot conceive of any other possible figure with those essential qualities.⁹ Though she never tried to reduce politics to mathematics, she relied on reasoning of the same style when puzzling through her observations of human behaviour and presented her conclusions with the same kind of certainty. As she explains in the first two chapters of the Institutions, and by implication in the rest of her writings, Du Châtelet had a clear image of a regulated universe – a cosmos governed by mathematically precise natural laws. These same kinds of laws, she believed, existed for the earthly social world of king, Church, and family.

Royal Government and Kings

In eighteenth-century France the king notionally embodied all the power of government. But this had little to do with the practical reality of French politics, with its many overlapping, antiquated authorities derived from manorialism and feudalism, centuries of local customs, dynastic conquests, and royal decrees – all augmented by the newer layers of ministerial and judicial bureaucracy. Such a complexity of powers was manifest in Du Châtelet’s own experience. The litigation concerning her husband’s Flanders inheritance drew her into a legal morass involving lawyers, philologists, the gathering of testimony from witnesses, and submission of numerous briefs and notarial records. The eventual negotiated settlement took years to achieve and forced her unwilling sojourn in Brussels from 1739 to 1742. More than once she had to attend the queen, Marie Leszczyńska, over long weeks at Versailles or Fontainebleau; she was no stranger to the antechambers of government ministers, nor to holding counsel with friends close to King Louis XV, such as the Duc de Richelieu. Patronage from these personal relationships brought Du Châtelet many successes, as it did for other aristocratic women of the haute noblesse. Between 1744 and 1747 she manoeuvred to have Voltaire elected to the Académie française (an appointment long overdue, and delayed by the queen’s distaste for his apparent lack of respect toward the Church), arranged her daughter’s marriage on better terms than she could have without patronage, and finessed her husband’s military rank so that he became one of the eleven lieutenants-general commanding the king’s armies.

Given these experiences, it is not surprising that Du Châtelet paints a sceptical picture of legislators and their governing devices, in her rendering of Mandeville’s Fable. While she omitted his Protestant criticism of the clergy, she accurately conveyed his contemptuous image of how politics worked. His society originated when ‘legislators’ manipulated men’s nature, using pride to make even the most selfish aspire to be good. Further, they ‘had found the means to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Women’s Political Ideas in Continental Europe
• Part II Women’s Political Ideas in the British Isles
• Bibliography
• Index