Consolation des femmes vefves de Paris, touchant la mort de leurs marys ou aliez pour le service du Parlement

Paris: Claude Boudeville, 1649

7, [1] p. | 4to | [A]^2 B^2 | 210 x 150 mm

First and only edition of this brief satirical address to those widowed by the Fronde, a series of civil wars in France waged 1648-1653. The work belongs to a class of some 5,000 political pamphlets, known as mazarinades, published during the insurrection. The title page bears a typical privilege statement (avec permission) and the coat of arms of Louis XIV, both of which we eye with some cynicism. ¶ The anonymous tract is addressed to Mes Dames, to the widows of those men lost in battle. The author thanks them for their sacrifices, for the sorrow they’ve borne as a result. The author speaks of women bawling their eyes out (p. 3: ces larmes pretieuses que vous avez versées jour & nuit; p. 4: ces torrents & cette abondance de larmes que vous versez continuellement). They implore them to find comfort in the glory they’ve earned for their country. ¶ In just about any other war, this might simply have been a creative dig at the opposing side. But there’s a particular irony in the case of the Fronde. It’s true that the war was started by France’s political elite (men) and had embroiled the country’s nobles by January 1649. “Perhaps the Fronde’s most extraordinary feature was the fact that, just as soon as nobles became involved, many of its important leaders were noble women: they were referred to by their contemporaries as Amazons. During the final years of the Fronde, women such as the Duchesse de Montpensier, the Duchesse de Chevreuse, and the Duchesse de Longueville gave France the most sustained and the most public examples of female militarism in its history. In Paris and in most of the country’s principal regions alike, the frondeuses were highly visible in command of armies and over battles. They themselves did not shed blood—like most contemporary male military leaders, these new Amazons directed battles from a distance rather than in the midst of the fray” (DeJean). Regardless of the pamphlet’s intended audience—men, women, or both—the irony should have been evident to any reader familiar with the situation. As DeJean has noted, these were highly visible women. For rhetorical intents and purposes, the audience addressed is not necessarily the usual class of war widows, whose lives had been upended by a conflict completely beyond their control. Rather, the widows addressed could well have been the very ones sending their men into battle. In a devious way, the satire chastises women by winking at their culpability—no surprise there—but it can’t do so without recognizing their unusual influence in a military sphere typically reserved for men. ¶ We won’t pretend the knowledge required to map this text to the complex positions of the Fronde, except to say that it’s critical of Cardinal Mazarin himself, as most mazarinades are. He’s referred to as the enemy on p. 5. Yet the court (parlement), the king, and the public appear to be rhetorically aligned. While the court and the public generally opposed the crown together in the Fronde, we wonder if the anonymous author blamed Mazarin for the crown’s role. They would hardly have been the only person to accuse Mazarin of controlling the impressionable tween King Louis XIV. ¶ Scarce. Our copy is the only auction record we find, and we locate just three copies in North America.

CONDITION: Nineteenth-century quarter red leather and marbled boards; marbled endpapers; green ribbon marker. ¶ Title page darkened, and bearing a small trace of adhered paper near the inner margin. Only gentle wear at the extremities. A nicely preserved copy of a rare piece.

REFERENCES: USTC 6006788; Célestin Moreau, Bibliographie des mazarinades (Paris: Renouard, 1850-1851), v. 2, p. 230, #773 ¶ Joan DeJean, “Violent Women and Violence against Women: Representing the ‘Strong’ Woman in Early Modern France,” Signs 29.1 (Autumn 2003), p. 131-132; Sophie Vergnes, “De la guerre civile comme vecteur d’émancipation féminine: l’exemple des aristocrates frondeuses (France, 1648-1653),” Genre & Histoire 6 (Spring 2010), “Conclusion” from unpaginated etext (“while the Fronde revealed the fragility of the queen’s power, it also demonstrated the extent of that of aristocratic women”; any feminism that emerged from the Fronde was an elitist one)

Item #435