Thanks to the “Capetian miracle,” the unbroken line of succession from father to son beginning in 987, the question of whether a woman could accede to the French throne did not arise for the first three hundred years of Capetian rule.
The miracle seemed to continue when Philip IV died leaving three sons in 1314.
However, fate intervened. As we have seen, Grand Master of the Templars Jacques de Molay, condemned by Philip IV to die at the stake, allegedly cursed the king as he awaited the flames.1 The malediction, if it was in fact uttered, proved effective! When Philip IV’s son Louis X died in 1316, he left only a four- year-old daughter, Jeanne.
Although Louis’s second queen, Clemence, gave birth to Louis’s posthumous son, the tiny Jean I died just weeks after his birth. Philip, brother of the defunct Louis X, assumed regency and promised to revisit succession when Jeanne came of age. And yet, over the following months he consolidated his power, negotiated renunciation of Jeanne’s claim with the girl’s maternal relatives, and, using Jeanne’s gender as one among other reasons for passing her over, acceded to the throne in 1317 as Philip V.[87] [88] When he died himself in 1322 leaving only daughters, female exclusion, although it would not be enshrined inthe Salic law for another hundred years, allowed his brother, Charles, to accede to the throne.[89]
But the Capetian miracle ran its course when Charles IV died in 1328 leaving only daughters: female exclusion, opportunistically invoked by Philip V, led to the demise of the Capetian dynasty. On the other hand, it guaranteed that the French throne would be occupied by a French king. In 1328 supporters of Philip VI ofValois, nephew of Philip IV, renewed the principle to counter a claim to the French throne by the king of England, Edward III, son of Philip IV’s daughter Isabelle. Had women been able to accede to the throne, or even pass on a claim to the throne, the English king Edward III would have succeeded Charles IV. Another advantage of female exclusion is that it prevented strife by limiting the number of pretenders to the throne, as Raymond Cazelles and others have noted.[90]
The aspect of female exclusion I explore here, however, has to do with its paradoxical facilitation of female rule in France: the fact that, by making women ineligible to accede to the throne, the principle guaranteed that they would be the safest regents.
As a direct consequence of female exclusion, France was effectively governed by women for just under 20 percent of the years between 1484 and 1651, five female regents ruling in kingdom that legally prohibited them from doing so. In fact, women ruled longer and more often in France than in England, where women could legally reign. And yet, if women were often called upon to guide the kingdom through the minority of young kings and often did it very skillfully, the job was complicated. Regents were always targets of charges of ambition and greed, and female regents, already disadvantaged by the usual array of negative stereotypes of women, were all the more susceptible to such criticism. The formidable female regents of France, Anne of France, Louise of Savoy, Catherine de Medicis, Marie de Medicis, and Anne of Austria, were all vilified by some contemporaries and modern historians, although revisions of their biographies have now become common.But the tradition of the female regent, as well as her vilification, properly begins with Queen Isabeau of Bavaria (ca. 1471—1435), wife of mad king Charles VI (1368—1422), and, although she seems to have been quite well regarded by contemporaries, she has been more harshly treated by historians than the other regents of France, with the possible exception of Catherine de Medicis. Little attention had been given the details of Isabeau’s reign until recently. Certainly the negative attitudes toward women and Germany shared by the most influential nineteenth-century historians of the queen are responsible for this relative neglect. But another major reason for Isabeau’s modern vilification has been the assumption that this queen’s power was comparable to that of later regents and that, had she tried, she could have stopped the civil war in France, invasion by the English, and the infamous Treaty of Troyes ceding the throne to Henry V of England. The assumption is not valid: Isabeau’s regency was a work in progress developing, reactively, in real time, out of a series of proposed solutions to a unique problem, an intermittently insane king, Charles VI, whose male relatives vied for decades to control the government by controlling him.
In typical regency situations the king is fully absent, permanently because dead or temporarily because gone from the kingdom for a designated period of time. In such situations, the regent is accorded the authority and power necessary to carry out the job. For example, in a document written up during the fatal illness of Louis VIII, the king wrote that his eldest son, his kingdom, and his other children were to be put under the care (“sub ballo sive tutela”) of his wife, Blanche of Castile;[91] Anne of France, jointly with her husband, Pierre of Beaujeu, was confirmed by the Estates General as custodians of the young king.[92]Isabeau was first appointed not as regent during the king’s absences but mediator, tasked with reconciling the two factions vying for power during the king’s periods of insanity. Only when the leaders of the conflict had proven intractable to attempts to reconcile them was she granted a sort of regency. However, her regency was doomed because her ability to govern depended on the cooperation of those same leaders who refused to step back, continuing their own struggle for control of the king. Her crisis was one of authority: despite the king’s ordinances, Isabeau never possessed the widely acknowledged authority a regent required to govern.[93]
In what follows I first revisit ordinances dating from 1393 to 1407 relevant to the early years of Isabeau’s regency to clarify the limits of her role at different periods. I then turn to attempts to enhance her authority, including those of the Royal Council and writer Christine de Pizan. Since the 1970s, Christine’s defenses of women have interested historians seeking to create a female history. In addition, Christine’s writings shed light on the development of female regency. Juxtaposed with the regency ordinances, they offer a window onto a society degenerating into civil unrest along with the reactive attempts to restore peace. Taken together, these writings represent the starting point of a particular tradition of female power in France.