History Commons^™

Parody, Performance, And Conspiracy In Early Eighteenth-Century France: The Subversive Court Of Louise Bénédicte De Bourbon, Daughter-In-Law Of The Sun King (1700–1718), Jordan Hallmark

Phi Alpha Theta Pacific Northwest Regional Conference

This paper examines how the French princess Louise Bénédicte de Bourbon, duchesse du Maine (1676–1753), the wife of Louis XIV’s illegitimate son, the duc du Maine, established an exclusive court at her château de Sceaux beginning in the year 1700 that challenged the centralized cultural system of the French monarchical state. Located twenty kilometers away from the rigid and controlling political center of Versailles, the court of the duchesse du Maine subverted social norms by inventing and performing parodies of court protocols, chivalric orders, emblems, and other forms of monarchical imagery. In a time and place where women were both …