Marie d'Orléans-Longueville

Entry by Sarah Hanley, 2004

Marie d'Orléans-Longueville was the daughter of Henri II d'Orléans, duc de Longueville (1595-1663), peer of France and prince in Neuchâtel (a Swiss principality), and Louise de Bourbon-Soissons (d. 1637) who arranged her fine education in Latin, arts, finance, jurisprudence, and governance. From Henri's second marriage (1642) to Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon-Condé (1619-1679), there were two sons: Jean-Louis-Charles, comte de Dunois (1646-1694), born to them, and Charles-Paris, comte de Saint Pol (1649-1672), born to Anne and François, duc de La Rochefoucauld, but legally reputed to Henri who did not disavow a second son. To advantage the sons, Henri and Anne excluded the daughter from major parts of the Longueville succession through a legal device, Renunciation, controversial in French jurisprudence. In 1655 Henri compelled Marie to renounce goods left by her deceased mother. In 1657 he abruptly forced her to accept an unfavorable marriage with Henri II, duc de Nemours (a chronic invalid), a marriage contract with an inadequate dowry, and a renunciation clause excluding her from the future succession of father and brothers.

A childless widow by 1659, Marie, duchesse de Nemours, controlled her vast wealth and chose not to remarry. In 1663 Jean succeeded as duke de Longueville and prince de Neuchâtel but took vows as a priest, the abbé d'Orléans, in 1669. In a donation of 1668, Jean passed the Longueville succession and sovereignty in Neuchâtel to Charles with a reversion clause returning the same, if Charles were to predecease him without male heirs. In a testament of 1668, he also named as heirs, if no Longueville males survived, the nearest collateral males, the princes of Conti (his two Bourbon maternal cousins not related to Marie). Yet the year 1672 was pivotal for the House of Orléans-Longueville: Jean was legally declared insane (an interdit) and Anne, his mother, named curator; the unwed Charles was killed at war; and Marie pursued the right to sovereignty in Neuchâtel by claiming the Longueville succession. In this prominent legal case, Longueville v. Nemours (1674), taken from the courtroom to the streets in judicial publicity, Marie attacked the French ideology of Male Right, which had replaced in the 1550s the medieval Salic law forgery; and she indicted its extensive legal effects in family and state. On one side, Marie de Nemours substituted a precept of Natural Rights for Male Right, denounced renunciation clauses, and claimed she was the only direct and legal heir. On the other side, Anne de Longueville (for her insane son Jean) defended Male Right as natural and legal, insisted Marie's renunciation was valid, and claimed the sovereignty in Neuchâtel had to revert to Jean. Although the legal decision of 1674, pronounced by Louis XIV, adhered to Male Right and ruled for the madman Jean, Marie had established grounds for another bid to rule in Neuchâtel. All the while, she crossed social ranks and kept lifelong company with eminent jurists and writers; extended patronage to women of letters, such as Marie-Catherine Desjardins, Mme de Villedieu, and Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier de Villandon, whose works condemned sex inequities; and befriended female cohorts compromised by forced, clandestine, and broken marriages. Around 1686-1687 she wrote reputed Mémoires of the Fronde, which gave a remarkably fair account of those events (1648-1653). When the mad Jean died in 1694, the Estates of Neuchâtel swiftly conferred the sovereignty on Marie, duchesse de Nemours, citing her Natural Rights (as a Longueville heir) and custom in Neuchâtel (recognizing female prerogative); and they rebuffed François, prince de Conti, who alleged strict Male Right. Ruling as sovereign princess of Neuchâtel, Marie was a living example of Natural Rights upheld; moreover, at her death, her warning of 1674, that Male Right entailed risks that could ruin both family and state, epitomized that danger. In 1707, when Nemours died, the House of Orléans-Longueville was extinguished; and France lost rights to the duchy of Neuchâtel when the Estates rejected Conti again and chose a Prussian contender. From 1674 into the 1700s the stance opposing Natural Rights to Male Right entered into the family inheritance contests that crowded court dockets in the monarchy; and the resulting theory of Natural Rights developed over time enabled legislators in the new republic to write equal inheritance for sons and daughters into French family law in 1793.

Works

- 1655 : Protestation de Madame la Duchesse de Nemours, du 14 May 1655. Contre sa renonciation à la Communauté d'entre Monsieur le Duc de Longueville son pere, et Madame sa mere...Inédit.
- [1673] : Relation du voyage de Madame de Nemours en Suisse. Inédit.
- 1709 : Mémoires de M. L. D. D. N., contenant ce qui s'est passé de plus particulier en France pendant la guerre de Paris, jusqu'à la prison du cardinal de Retz, arrive en 1652. Avec les différens caractères des personnes, qui ont eu part à cette guerre, éd. Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier de Villandon, Cologne -- éd. Micheline Cuénin, Mémoires de Marie d'Orléans, duchesse de Nemours (1625-1707), Paris, Mercure de France, 1990.

Selected bibliography

- Blondeau, Claude et Gabriel Guéret (éd.). Journal du Palais, ou recueil des principales decisions de tous les parlemens, et cours souveraines de France [Longueville v. Nemours 1674]. Paris, Le Gras, 1755 [1681, 1701, 1713].
- Cuénin, Micheline, introduction à l'édition des Mémoires de Marie d'Orléans -- voir supra, «OEuvres».
- Hanley, Sarah. «The Jurisprudence of the Arrêts: Marital Union, Civil Society, and State Formation in France, 1550-1650». Law and History Review, 21-1, 2003, p.1-40.
- Hanley, Sarah. «From the Law Court to a Tribunal in Society 1674-1755: The French Ideology of Male Right as a Perversion of Nature and Law». The Journal of Modern History (2005, à paraître).
- Hanley, Sarah. «La Loi Salique», in Christine Fauré (dir.), Encyclopédie politique et historique des femmes. Paris, P.U.F., 1997, p.11-30 (éd. anglaise: London, Routledge, 2003, p.3-12; éd. espagnole à paraître).

Reception

- [A propos des Mémoires de la Fronde]: «Elle n'a uniquement pensé qu'à peindre la verité, sans qu'aucun rapport ni à ses intérêts ni à sa gloire ait eu la moindre part dans ses Portraits» (Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier de Villandon, «Avertissement», in Mémoires de M. L. D. D. N., voir supra, «Oeuvres», fol. a-ii).
- (A propos du mariage de Marie d'Orléans): «on ne comprenoit pas que la plus riche héritiere de France... voulût espouser un cadet dont l'esprit étoit assez scholastique, la personne assez défigurée par une fâcheuse maladie à laquelle il étoit assez sujet, sans biens, sans établissemens ni sans consideration. [...] M. de Longueville [...] pressoit sa fille de conclure avec M. de Nemours; ce qu'il fit. Elle se maria et pleura beaucoup, à ce que j'ai ouï dire» (Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier, Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier [1728], Nouvelle Collection des Mémoires pour server à l'Histoire de France, Michaud et Poujoulat, éd. Paris, Éditeur du Commentaire Analytique du Code Civil, 1838, vol.4, p.252).
- «Les Mémoires de la duchesse de Nemours sont, en effet, écrits avec la plus scrupuleuse fidélité et d'un style plein de grâce, d'esprit et de finesse. On remarque surtout quelques portraits peints de main de maître» (Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, Pierre Larousse (éd.), Paris, Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1874, vol.11, p.915).
- «Nemours a laissé des Mémoires [...] écrits dans un style facile [et] intéressants [...]; mais on ne peut guère y chercher la vérité sur les personnages de la Fronde et principalement sur la duchesse de Longueville [Anne], et sur les frères de sa belle-mère [Condé et Conti], contre lesquels ils ne sont à vrai dire qu'un long factum. La malignité a souvent guidé sa plume...» (Nouvelle biographie générale depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu'à nos jours..., Ferdinand Hoefer (éd.), Paris, Firmin Didot frères, 1863, vol.37, p.670).