Marguerite de Valois: "La reine Margot."

Modern Language Review, The, Oct, 2006 by Moshe Sluhovsky

Marguerite de Valois 'la reine Margot'. By ELIANE VIENNOT. (Collection Tempus) Paris: Perrin. 2005. 660 pp. 11 [euro]. ISBN 2-262-02377-8.

Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615) was a diplomat, a patron of the arts and a muse, an author and a poet, and a prominent salonniere. Alas, she is known less for her achievements and more for her traditional womanly/familial roles as daughter of King Henri II, sister of three kings, and wife of a fourth (Henri IV). Above all, she is known for her marriage-turned-bloodbath on Saint Bartholomew's Night, 1572, her humiliating expulsion from her husband's court, and her alleged sexual promiscuity, rivalled by none. As both the title and the content of Eliane Viennot's scholarly and yet highly readable book demonstrate, Marguerite de Valois encompasses two women in one: the flesh-and-blood woman, one of the more accomplished women of the French Renaissance, and the bloodthirsty and carnal 'reine Margot', whose life lasted from the early seventeenth century to the 1994 release of Patrice Chereau's cinematic version of the queen's life.

While the two women have always been separate entities, Viennot points out the difficulties in distinguishing the 'true' Marguerite from the legend. Already during the Queen's lifetime, her husband's entourage blackened her image, thus justifying the King's annulment of their marriage. Court historians falsified documents and invented anecdotes that later historians relied upon. And yet Viennot succeeds in separating the wheat from the chaff, and reconstructs the complex personality and historical context of the last heir to the Valois family and fortune. She is especially good on the Queen's diplomatic mission to Flanders and on Marguerite's patronage of the arts.

It is a pity, though, that Viennot does not pay more attention to Marguerite's own writings, especially her Discours docte et subtil envoye a l'autheur de Secrets moraux (1618). This long letter, Marguerite's contribution to the Querelle de femmes, as well as her self-presentation in her Memoires, testifies to the Queen's attempts to create a feminine literary persona while following gender and class preconceptions of her time. Her engagement with these issues highlights the difficulties that elite women of Marguerite's time experienced in their attempts to articulate a new 'feminist' literary strategy. A huge body of literature over the last thirty years has uncovered the ingenuities and strategies of emancipation of women authors of the French Renaissance, but in Viennot's book Marguerite is portrayed more as a muse than as an author in her own right.

Viennot's 'second biography' documents the vagaries of the Queen's image through the ages. During the early years of the seventeenth century, Marguerite was remembered most often as a patron of the arts and an accomplished author. But in the 1630s, when Louis XIII and his courtiers initiated a campaign against the Queen Mother Marie de Medici, a systematic discrediting of all powerful queens revived Marguerite's black legend. Twenty years later, the rising bourgeoisie used Marguerite's alleged sexual promiscuity as a symbol for the aristocracy's decadence.

But no one has done more to turn Marguerite de Valois into 'la reine Margot' than nineteenth-century romanciers, first and foremost Alexandre Dumas. She was reinvented as the melodramatic heroine par excellence: the woman who loved and hated too much, whose life was manipulated by external and internal powers and desires beyond her control. Dumas's Margot was both the ultimate villain and the ultimate femme fatale, and this latest incarnation then percolated into all later biographies of the Queen by popular authors, professional historians, and cineastes. Viennot dismisses the historical reliability of these portrayals of Marguerite, systematically exposing the misogynistic assumptions and metaphors they employ. She reserves much of her criticism for Chereau's film, which initiated a wave of new publications on Marguerite. While she criticizes the film and the avalanche of books that accompanied it, Viennot herself could not resist the temptation to 'jump on Chereau's wagon'. Her book, in fact, is a slightly revised version of her Marguerite de Valois: histoire d'une femme, histoire d'un mythe (Paris: Payot, 1993). Not only is there no explicit mention of this fact in the new edition (except for the copyright icon), but the previous edition is mentioned explicitly as a separate book. A short addition, summarizing the publications that accompanied the film, is the only difference between the two books. And, of course, the title has changed, making use of the very same construct 'la reine Margot' that Viennot criticizes so severely.

MOSHE SLUHOVSKY

THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM