Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University History Theses Department of History 8-10-2021 Madame du Barry: Images of a Mistress Abigail C. Hortenstine Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.edu/history_theses Recommended Citation Hortenstine, Abigail C., "Madame du Barry: Images of a Mistress." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2021. doi: https://doi.57709/23982254 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of History at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University.
For more information, please contact scholarworks@gsu. Madame du Barry: Images of a Mistress by Abigail Hortenstine Under the Direction of Denise Davidson, PhD A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2021 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the many images of Madame du Barry, the last maîtresse-en-titre of King Louis XV of France. Through the interrogation of a variety of sources, including artwork, apocryphal memoirs, and her apartments within Versailles, I examine the ways in which Madame du Barry curated her own image as well as how she was rendered by others. By revealing the many masks worn by du Barry, this thesis explores the impact of du Barry’s life and public persona while simultaneously exploring the concepts of celebrity, performance, and the Court as theater.
This thesis argues that the Court served as a venue for social and political performance and that close examination of the maîtresse-en-titre illuminates the rise of celebrity and the importance of political performance in the decades leading up to the French Revolution. INDEX WORDS: Maîtresse-en-titre, Royal mistress, Private and public sphere, France Copyright by Abigail Carson Hortenstine 2021 Madame du Barry: Images of a Mistress by Abigail Hortenstine Committee Chair: Denise Davidson Committee: Joe Perry Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Services College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University August 2021 iv DEDICATION I would like to dedicate this thesis to my husband, Charles Hortenstine. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank everyone who has helped me throughout this process. My husband’s time and advice were invaluable in the completion of the thesis.
I would also like to thank my parents and friends who took the time to read over the material and provide me with feedback. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Denise Davidson and Dr. Joe Perry, whose patience and expert advice made the completion of this project possible.
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. V LIST OF FIGURES .1 Historiography and Context .3 Method and Theory. 14 2 THE SCANDALOUS DAZZLE OF HER LIFE.2 The Palace and Exile .3 Her Crimes, Both Real and Perceived .4 A Trial of Her Own. 31 3 PORTRAITURE, POLITICS, AND THE PUBLIC GAZE .1 The Female Body, Beauty, and Aesthetics in Eighteenth-Century France .2 Images of a Mistress .3 Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Madame du Barry .4 The Mistresses Apartments .5 Celebrity and Causes Célèbres .6 Curating Her Public Image.
52 4 APOCRYPHAL BEST-SELLERS: SHADOWS OF THE THEATER .1 The Shopgirl, the Prostitute, and the Joke .2 The Actress on a Stage. 86 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 3. Portrait of Madame du Barry. François Hubert Drouais.
Oil on canvas, 78 ¾ x 55 in. Location: Chambre de Commerce, Versailles, France. Accessed through JSTOR.Portrait of Madame du Barry. Louise-Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun.
Oil on panel, 27 ¼ x 20 ¼ in. Location: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Accessed through JSTOR. Portrait of Madame du Barry.
Louise-Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. Oil on canvas, 114. Location: National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection, Washington, D. Bust of Madame du Barry.
Ceramics, soft-paste porcelain, 12 ¾ x 8 ½ x 5 in. Location: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA. Photograph credit: Thomas R. Accessed through JSTOR.
Secret passageway from the king’s apartments to Madame du Barry’s apartments. Photo of the video tour of the Mistress’ Apartments at the Palace of Versailles by Brady Haran. Madame du Barry’s bed. Photo of the video tour of the Mistress’ Apartments at the Palace of Versailles by Brady Haran.
Swan basin in Madame du Barry’s apartments. Photo of the video tour of the Mistress’ Apartments at the Palace of Versailles by Brady Haran. Vanity and nude statue in Madame du Barry’s apartments. Photo of the video tour of the Mistress’ Apartments at the Palace of Versailles by Brady Haran.
Photo of the shutters and window in Madame du Barry’s living room. Photo of the video tour of the Mistress’ Apartments at the Palace of Versailles by Brady Haran. Photo of Madame du Barry’s living room and parquet flooring. Photo of the video tour of the Mistress’ Apartments at the Palace of Versailles by Brady Haran.85 9 1 INTRODUCTION Born in 1743 to a working-class family, Jeanne Bécu was an unlikely subject to catch the eye of the King.
By the 1760s, however, King Louis XV desired Bécu as his royal mistress. Jeanne Bécu, along with her mentor, Jean du Barry, were aware that for the two of them to acquire official access to the royal bedchamber and the Court, they had to manufacture a noble version of Bécu. To achieve this, Bécu married Jean du Barry’s brother, Guillaume, Comte du Barry in 1768 and became the Comtesse du Barry, securing her role as the maîtresse-en-titre.1 She acted as the King’s royal mistress until his death in 1774. Her own death did not come until much later, in 1793, on the scaffold of the guillotine.
This thesis is inspired and guided by the question of how Madame du Barry manipulated and engaged with the opinion of the court. Was she able to achieve political and social influence? What role did the gendered public and private spheres play in her access to political agency? My research stems from sources dating from Madame du Barry’s lifetime and the decades following her death.1 Historiography and Context The emergence of the bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth century transformed the political participation of the people of France, but also paved the way for women’s exclusion from politics.2 Habermas argued that with the rise of literacy and salons came the emergence of this bourgeois public sphere. Joan Landes offered a feminist critique of Habermas’ theories, 1 Contrat de mariage entre le comte Guillaume Du Barry, militaire de carrière, demeurant rue Neuve-des-Petits- Champs, fils d’Antoine Du Barry et de Catherine de La Cuze, et Jeanne Gomard de Vaubergnier, fille de Jean Jacques Gomard de Vau Bergnier (ou Vaubergnier), et d’Anne Bécu, épouse en secondes noces de Nicolas Rançon, 23 July 1768, MC/ET/XCIX/577, Minutes et répertoires du notaire Edme Garnier-Deschesnes, Archives Nationales, Paris, France. 2 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans.
10 arguing that the bourgeois public sphere excluded women, making it “masculinist,” at its core.3 One of the primary failures of the monarchy in the eyes of the public was its degradation. The King and his family were supposed to be extensions of the divine, but by the time Louis XV reigned, he was involved in many earthly dalliances. These indiscretions often occurred in the arms of a woman, and it was in this way that the people of France came to blame the desacralization of the monarchy on women. By proxy, traits considered to be feminine, such as secrecy and policy making behind closed doors, further levied the blame against the women of Versailles.4 In essence, Landes argued that the Revolution led to a less flexible understanding of the public and the private spheres and that they became more distinct than ever before.
Landes, along with Lynn Hunt, built on this discussion by incorporating analysis of eroticism and the body politic. Hunt and Landes argued that women threatened men through their participation in salons because of the expectation of an inevitable feminine corruption of political life.5 Sarah Maza contributed to this conversation through her work on the role of elite women in the public sphere. Maza highlighted the connections between elite women in the public sphere and the eroticism of the body politic via the elite female body.6 Recent work by Tracy and Christine 3 Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press: 1988), 6-7. Here, Landes revises Habermas’ theories, articulating the importance of re-centering the discussion around the bourgeois public’s exclusion of women as a way to better understand the emergence of modern feminism.
4 Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 177. See also Christine Adams and Tracy Adams, The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame du Barry (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020). 5 Lynn Hunt, ed. Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 5.
Here, Hunt summarizes Landes’ argument that women were viewed as possessing a “propensity for self-display in public,” which perpetuated “corrupting effects on masculine virtue,” thus blaming women for poor male behavior. 6 Sarah Maza, “The Diamond Necklace Affair Revisited (1785-1786): The Case of the Missing Queen,” In Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. 11 Adams further discussed elite women who inserted themselves into the French public sphere, focused exclusively on the institution of the maîtresse-en-titre.7 The historiography on the concept of celebrity, causes célèbres, and the emergence of the category of celebrity is simultaneously varied and lacking. While there is much discussion on the topics, there is no comprehensive account on the birth of celebrity in eighteenth-century France, save the work of Antoine Lilti.
Though Lilti attempted this, he spent more time creating and defining terminology than truly tracing the development of the concepts.8 After considering the literature, I demonstrate that there are substantial historiographical gaps, including works on the roles of gender and sexuality in the emergence of celebrity in the eighteenth century, biographical works on eighteenth-century celebrities, the philosophe as a celebrity, the maîtresse-en-titre as celebrity, and finally, on the role of material culture in the development of self-propaganda and social influence in the decades leading up to the French Revolution. Though Sarah Maza, Dena Goodman, Joan Landes, Mary Sheriff, and other prominent scholars laid the groundwork for the connection between the political and private worlds and carefully crafted the narrative on gender and sexuality in the transformation of the body politic around the time of the Revolution, their research did not delve into the role of gender and sexuality in the context of the emergence of celebrity.9 In their edited volume, The New Biography, Jo Burr Margadant and her colleagues explored the use of biography as history from a new perspective. Margadant saw the importance of gender performance in the construction of 7 Adams and Adams, The Creation of the French Royal Mistress. The authors trace the rise and the fall of the institution of the royal mistress in France, even going as far as lumping Marie Antoinette into the category of mistress.
They interrogate their sources to answer the question of why this institution was peculiar to France and what about France allowed these women to become official members of court. 8 Antoine Lilti, The Invention of Celebrity, 1750-1850, trans. 9 This statement is not to say that their research should have done so. That was not even close to the target they were shooting for.
They hit their target, that is the eroticism of the body politic as a symptom of civil unrest. I am merely acknowledging the importance of the foundation they laid in the study of gender and sexuality in eighteenth century-French history and calls for a new contribution to the field. 12 identity and celebrity status in the nineteenth century and proved that this is a valuable historical category, treading in the wake of the Scott-Ozouf debate.