Christine de Pizan and female exclusion from succession
Because Isabeau’s position was visibly weak, Christine de Pizan intervened to support the queen against the warring dukes. Much has been written about Christine’s self-authorization, that is, the ways in which she depicts herself within her writings to justify the audacious act of writing as a woman.
Less has been written about how her writings create authority for others. In this section, I read Christine’s Book of the City of Ladies, Le Livre des trois vertus, and “An Epistle to the Queen of France” as highly topical defenses of Isabeau’s regency which add important information about how we should understand the limitations of the queen’s authority. In supporting Isabeau, Christine draws implicitly but unmis- takeably on the Valois policy of excluding women from succession to promote Isabeau as the safest regent. Although the Valois originally drew on female exclusion to support Philip of Valois’s claim to the throne over Edward III of England, the principle was accepted in the first place because it conformed to one popular construction of the female as the complement of the male. This is how Christine herself constructs gender. Christine’s promotion of female exclusion from the throne results logically from her notion of gender, and it drives her to support Isabeau as precisely the kind of regent we see emerge in the late fifteenth century.It is not clear in which year the mode of devolution of the French throne to the nearest male relative and the concomitant exclusion of females—the so-called Salic Law—was first associated with the Lex Salica. Chronicler Richard Lescot may have been the first to claim that the “De allodis” clause of the Lex Salica excluded women from succession to the French throne in 1358; however, his claim may be an interpolation.[113] [114] [115] Salic Law is certainly mentioned by Jean de Montreuil in A Toute la chevalerie around 1409.28 This means that Christine de Pizan’s major defenses of women may predate any widespread discourse on Salic Law. Still, as a reader of the Grandes chroniques de France,2 she would have been aware that the Valois had come to power by excluding women from the throne. In her description of the French monarchy in the Livre du Corps depolicie of 1407 she discusses different possible types of government, concluding with Aristotle that the best is that of the French, “government and lordship by one,” as opposed to a form of election. But, she continues, beyond their superior form of government, the great fortune of the French is that they have never suffered under a foreign king.[116] Of course, it was not true that the French line had passed unbroken from father to son: it was broken when Philip VI succeeded his cousin Charles IV, as Christine would have been well aware. However, she is correct that the French would have suffered under a foreign king had succession passed through women. As a supporter of the Valois, then, Christine supported female exclusion from succession, and she uses the principle to support Isabeau as the best candidate for regent when the king was insane. This becomes clear when we read her writings of 1405 in their historical context. As we have seen, Jean became duke of Burgundy with Philip’s death in 1404 and immediately intensified the struggle for influence over the king with Louis. Isabeau appears to have been alarmed at the threat that Jean represented, because she articulated her support of Louis against Jean, stipulating that she would defend the new Duke of Burgundy only to the degree appropriate to family hierarchy, which meant that Louis, the king’s brother, came first.[117] Her new stance was soon put to the test. Although in April 1405 Jean of Burgundy had requested that the usual military aides and the annual allowance for the upkeep of the Sluis garrison be continued, and although his emissary reported that the funds had been allocated, he was unable to collect them.[118] Jean sent ambassadors to the king, queen, and the Council, but, according to chronicler Monstrelet, they did not receive the funds.[119] To impose his will, Jean needed to take control of the Royal Council, which meant disposing of Louis. Jean’s first show of force came on 15 August 1405, when he left Arras for Paris with an army of 800 men, claiming that he wanted only to render homage for his recent maternal inheritance and respond to the king’s request that he come to discuss financial reform of the kingdom.[120] However, to Isabeau and Louis, the new Duke of Burgundy looked to be getting ready to seize control of the realm. When the king fell into madness on August 16 or 17, the dauphin became the primary pawn in the struggle. Isabeau and Louis moved to the queen’s fortified chateau at Melun and sent for the dauphin and other royal children. Named guardian of the children in the ordinance of 1393, Isabeau was within her rights to send for them. But Jean intercepted the convoy carrying the dauphin and other children as they made their way to Melun and forced them to turn back to Paris.[121] That he recognized that he was violating Isabeau’s authority is made clear by a letter he sent that same day to the cities of France in which he justified his actions: he had intervened, thinking that something was amiss.[122] Louis replied in his own public letter of 2 September: “We are amazed at the power and authority that he or they attempted to arrogate in violating the authority over the children that my lord [the king] granted to my lady [the queen] in the presence of all of us...7[123] In addition, he claimed, Jean was seeking to gain control of the king, “wanting to hold him in custody or in guardianship.”[124] For several weeks, the dukes remained in a stand-off, Jean in Paris, Isabeau and Louis in Melun. The people of Paris and the University supported Jean, seeing him as a good-faith financial reformer. But other significant bodies in Paris, including the Parlement and the Chambre des comptes, refused to take his side.[125] Furthermore, the Royal Council denied his authority. Royal uncle Jean of Berry took custody of the dauphin shortly after the boy’s return to Paris and had himself named Captain General of the city, organizing the king’s army to defend it.[126] Jean increased the size of his army in mid-September, causing Louis to prepare for attack. Returning to Isabeau and the problem of authority, as we have seen, Jean ignored the authority granted her by the king as guardian of the royal children: backed by a sizeable army, he could do so. But despite his show of force, Jean did not succeed because his authority was not recognized by the key players noted above.[128] He was therefore forced to negotiate with the queen and Louis of Orleans. Isabeau was the obvious party to mediate peace, but she required the authority to begin negotiations. It is important to recall that, according to royal ordinance, Isabeau exercised the role of mediator only when the king was mad. As I noted, the king had fallen into madness on 16 August, but he had regained his senses on 25 August, remaining lucid until September 23 or 25, as Pintoin reports.[129] It is difficult to know what this means: it did not necessarily mean that the king was functioning rationally. Still, Isabeau waited until the king was deemed insane again, and, on 27 September, accompanied by Louis, she made a first move to restore peace, leaving Melun for Corbeil, closer to Paris. Christine, residing in Paris, would have been aware of the danger, when she penned her letter of 5 October, “Une Epistre a la Royne de France.” The letter has long been taken at face value, as a personal letter requesting the queen to take action, and it has been adduced as evidence that Christine believed the queen to be frivolous and lazy, neglectful of her responsibilities to the royal family and to the people of France. One phrase in the letter in particular is responsible for the misapprehension: “Most High and Reverend Lady, although your mind is well aware and told of what it should know, it may nevertheless be true that you, seated on your royal throne surrounded with honors, cannot know, except by someone’s report, the common problems, in words as well as in facts, which prevail upon your subjects.”[130] But the letter read in its entirety tells a different story. Most Revered Lady, do not therefore wonder if to you — who, according to everyone’s opinions and beliefs, can be the medicine and sovereign remedy for this kingdom now so pitifully wounded and injured, and in danger of worse — I turn and come, not to beg on behalf of a foreign land, but on behalf of your own land and natural heritage of your very own noble children. Most High and Reverend Lady, although your mind is well aware and told of what it should know, it may nevertheless be true that you, seated on your royal throne surrounded with honors, cannot know, except by someone’s report, the common problems, in words as well as in facts, which prevail upon your subjects. For this reason, High Lady, do willingly hear the complaint and pitiful regrets of the suffering and suppliant French people now full of affliction and sadness, and who cry with tearful voices to you, their supreme and revered Lady, praying, by the mercy of God, that a humble pity may show to your tender heart their desolation and misery, so that you can proceed and obtain peace soon between these two princes of the same blood and who are loved ones by nature, but who are at present brought to a quarrel by strange Fortune.[132] Although Christine greets Isabeau as a powerful figure, she strategically foregrounds the queen’s precariously liminal position. Most important, Christine’s purpose is not to convince Isabeau that she should act. Isabeau is ready to do just that. Rather, the poet is training the letter’s wider audience, reminding them of the precedent for queenly intervention. She cites a number of queens who intervened on behalf of their people, in addition to the epitome of queenly mediation, the Virgin Mary: Esther, Bathsheba, and earlier queen of France, Blanche of Castile.[133] The letter thus builds its argument on female exclusion from rule: a mother, like Blanche, Isabeau poses no threat, unlike the dukes whose struggle to seize power had brought on the dire situation. Christine criticizes them with special severity in her final lines, concluding with a vigorous warning to the powerful man welcomed by Fortune.[134] If he does not conduct himself wisely and with charity, he will be forever condemned by his evil reputation. Chased off like a dog, reviled by a crowd of people who shout after him that he has merited his fate, the once-powerful man makes clear that the point of the letter is to promote the queen over the destructive dukes. Reinforcing Christine’s letter, a new ordinance authorizing the queen to mediate was passed by the Royal Council on 12 October. The ordinance accords Isabeau full authority (“puissance”) to resolve the crisis through friendly means, if possible; if not, it stipulates that her orders should be treated exactly like those of the king. Her authority enhanced, Isabeau entered arbitration, and a peace treaty was signed on October 16, temporarily heading off disaster. To support Isabeau against the belligerent dukes over the next few years, Christine further builds her case for the queen in the Book of the City of Ladies and the Book of the Three Virtues. While Christine’s most important feminine defense, the Book of the City of Ladies, praises women for their literary, artistic, moral, and spiritual achievements, it begins and ends with the Virgin Mary, a regent, a woman who co-rules with her son. In chapter four, I discuss Isabeau’s association with the Virgin during her entry into Paris for her coronation; Christine cannot help but evoke the queen with such imagery. The first queen mentioned by the allegorical figure Raison in part one of the Book of the City of Ladies is the Empress Nicole, the Queen of Sheba, frequently interpreted as a figure for the Virgin during the Middle Ages, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly through her association with the Bride of Christ of the “Song of Solomon.”[135] A series of regents follows the Queen of Sheba: Fredegunde, Semiramis, Zenobia, Artemisia, Lilia, Berenice, Opis, Lavinia, Clotilde, Blanche of Castile, and contemporary princesses of France. Like Isabeau, these women did not rule independently, in their own names, but as regents, representatives, of their husbands, sons or fathers. Isabeau appears in Book 2, at the head of the good and generous princesses of France. She is a praiseworthy woman, Christine claims, “in whom there is nothing of cruelty, extortion, or any evil vice, but only good love and beneficence towards her subjects.”[136] The construction implies a contrast between Isabeau and the warring dukes. They are cruel; they are extortionists; they are filled with vice. She is not. Christine, then, promotes Isabeau’s regency, a position compatible with her understanding of gender. As she explains in the Cite des dames, “God wanted men and women to serve him differently, and to help each other and give each other mutual aid, each according to his manner, and He thus created the two sexes to be of different natures, as necessary to the accomplishment of the tasks.”[137] Christine also conveys very clearly that women are capable substitutes for men when they are absent. In the Mutacion de la Fortune, she narrates her own metamorphosis into a man so as to be able to take care of her family when she is left a young widow.[138] A consideration of Christine’s handbook for female behavior, the Book of the Three Virtues, also written around 1405, further illuminates the poet’s vision of the princess as mediator rather than ruler in her own right. Dedicated to the dauphine, Marguerite of Burgundy, the work offers the girl a lesson in real time with its implicit glossing of current events. The female’s purpose in the political world is to intercede, Christine insists; force for peace, she tempers impulsive male reactions. When war threatens her country, the princess’s task is “to be the means of peace and harmony, and to work to avoid war because of the trouble that can arise from it.”[139] Christine also reconciles women’s compassionate, maternal, and peace-loving qualities with the need for the authority. The mediating princess will attempt “through cheer and sweetness to attract [her husband] to her point of view, and if she recognizes that she needs to tell him something, she will bring it up when they are alone, sweetly and gently. Sometimes she will urge him because of the devotion he owes her, sometimes by his pity for her, other times laughing as if she is playing.”[140] Women are the excluded from certain male occupations and yet essential to society’s successful functioning, because they correct certain potentially destructive male flaws. Despite the traditional association of women with the body and men with rationality, women according to Christine represent measure and intelligence as opposed to unthinkingly emotional men. She writes that “men are by nature hardier and hotter, and the great desire they have to avenge themselves does not allow them to think in advance about the dangers and evils that might come from this.”[141] Without female mediation, male society would degenerate into constant strife. In his 1888 study of the Cabochian revolt, Alfred Coville assesses Isabeau’s regency as failure because of her own incompetence and favoritism, pronouncing that she was “incapable of healing the kingdom.” She tried several times to re-establish peace between the dukes, but, at heart, she long bore a marked preference for the Orleanist party. In January, 1403, she managed to get the two dukes, Philip of Burgundy and Louis of Orleans, to sign a treaty of reconciliation; at the beginning of 1405, she accepted a friendship with Jean sans Peur; these demonstrations could not have been sincere.[142] Two unjustified assumptions underlie Colville’s judgement, first, that feuding was an aberration easily controlled by competent mediation. Scholarship on feuding suggests, however, that such conflict was endemic, “integral to the conduct of politics in early modern France because it was one of the key forms of competition for power, a mechanism by which the struggle for dominance was played out,” as Stuart Carroll writes.[143] Feuding aimed to settle specific conflicts like the one I have been describing, the struggle for custody of the king, and occurred “between groups of roughly equal socio-political power, where there [was] no ‘higher’ political authority which [was] capable of ending the dispute, either through the participants’ mutual acceptance of its right to arbitrate, or through its ability to stamp out the dispute forcibly.”[144] A claimant challenged, so to speak, with an act of violence. The victim of the violence responded to prevent the result sought by the instigator, and the violence escalated. Christine intervened in an increasingly disruptive feud by alerting her readers about the dangers of the diverse claims of Charles’s male relatives and attempting to bolster Isabeau’s authority to mediate among them. As E. Jeffrey Richards has demonstrated, Christine was interested in legal scholarship; she would have been capable of understanding the nuances of the legal arguments about regency common among writers of her time.[145] But for her public, she adopted the method of Jean Gerson, who insisted upon the value of images. Gerson advised his congregation to make present the “piteous appearance of your Savior Jesus” in the “eyes of your thought.”[146] In the same way, the vividly imagistic “Epistle” Book of the City of Ladies, and the Book of the Three Virtues promote a theory of female co-regency through figures like Blanche of Castile, mother co-ruling with her minor son, and the Virgin Marie, to counter the claims of the dukes who wish to usurp the king’s power. The type of government most likely to protect the French from the dangers wrought by their king’s madness is co-regency, where the queen, who is peaceful and conciliatory, rules in the name of her son or husband.