Marie de La Tour d'Auvergne

Entry by Sonja Kmec, 2003

Marie de La Tour was born in Turenne on January 17, 1601, to Henri, Duc de Bouillon (1555-1623) and his second wife, Elisabeth de Nassau-Orange (1577-1642), the daughter of William the Silent and Charlotte de Bourbon-Montpensier. Marie was brought up in the independent principality of Sedan and was given a fairly strict Calvinist education by her mother. In 1619, she married her cousin Henri de la Trémoille, Duke of Thouars (1598-1674), as had been arranged when she was still a child. Little by little, she took over the management of the household from the dowager duchess Charlotte-Brabantine, and ruled by procuration, in particular, the domains of Laval and Vitré. Having been accused of ill judgement in selling some patrimonial domains and spending lavishly on architectural projects, she defended herself in a Mémoire written in 1661. In it, she explains the necessity of renovating the medieval castle of Vitré and of rebuilding that of Thouars, works she had entrusted in 1638 to Jacques Lemercier. Although her husband converted to Catholicism in 1628, Marie remained faithful to her reformed religion and protected the Huguenot communities in Poitou and upper Brittany. She raised her daughters Elisabeth (1628-1640) and Marie-Charlotte (1632-1682) as Protestants and persuaded her elder son, Henri-Charles, later Prince of Tarente (1620-1672), to convert back to Protestantism when he reached the age of majority. When the Protestant churches in Thouars and Vitré were threatened with destruction, Marie de La Tour negotiated to have them rebuilt on other sites and then oversaw the building works. Her religious beliefs did not prevent her from attending court and the salons of the Princess of Condé and the Marquise of Rambouillet, as her Recueil de Devises shows.

In 1648, Marie de La Tour married her elder son to Amelia von Hesse-Kassel and negotiated the inclusion of a clause in the Treaty of Westphalia granting the duke the nominal title of king of Naples. After campaigning for the official recognition by the French court of the status of her brothers Bouillon and Turenne as foreign princes, she joined them during the first Fronde in early 1649. Following the Peace of Rueil, she forged closer ties with Mazarin in the hope of being granted the rule of the Maine region, and refused to join the princes' party. When her son openly supported Condé in October 1651, she remained in contact with the court and acted as a go-between. In 1656, she managed to obtain the liberation of her son who had been imprisoned in Amiens for several months. She became friends with Mademoiselle de Montpensier and was one of the first to dedicate a self-portrait to her.

After playing a part in settling the differences between the orthodox and universalist Protestant churches by enjoining them to sign the Act of Thouars in 1649, Marie de La Tour renewed her support for the Reformed Church in 1659, when she hosted the last national synod in Loudun. That same year, she went against the orthodox Calvinists by supporting Alexandre Morus who was hoping to be appointed to a ministry in Charenton. Against the wishes of her younger son Louis-Maurice (1624-1681), an Oratorian, Marie made her continued support of the Protestant cause clear in 1662 by marrying her daughter Marie to Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar, nephew of the famous general of the same name. Marie de La Tour's health began to decline, but she refused to convert despite pressure to do so from the queen mother. She died on Sunday May 24, 1665, and her body was transferred to the ducal chapel in Thouars without any form of ceremony.

Marie's contemporaries called her "the queen of protestants" and a précieuse. The first designation reflects her growing prestige in Charenton after the Catholic marriages of Châtillon, Montausier, and Marguerite de Rohan in 1645. Saint-Simon describes her political ambition at length, echoing the Mémoires of Madame de Motteville and giving rein to his personal dislike for the La Tour d'Auvergne and La Trémoille families. In the nineteenth century, Marie de La Tour was first accused of tyranny and profligacy by Berthre de Bourniseaux in his Histoire de Thouars (Niort, 1824, p.195, 199), then defended by Hugues Imbert in his work of the same title (Niort, 1871, p.282-5) who praises her morality and humanism. Today, her political role seems to have been forgotten: she is mentioned only as a précieuse by literary historians such as Myriam Maître in her work Les Précieuses (Paris, 1999, p.685).

(translated by Susan Pickford)

Works

- vers 1646-vers 1662 : Recueil de devises, illustré d'une quarantaine d'images peintes à la main, données à Marie de La Tour par diverses personnes. Inédit.
- 1657 : Portrait de Mme la duchesse de La Trimouille fait par elle-mesme à Touars au mois de novembre 1657, in Divers portraits. s.l., 1659, p.15-22. (La même année son portrait est publié dans Recueil des portraits et éloges, en vers et en prose, dédié à son Altesse royale Mademoiselle. Paris, Ch. Sercy et Cl. Barbin, petit format p.68-77; grand format p.71-86.)
- 1661 : Mémoire. Le Mémoire de 1661, in Hugues Imbert (éd.), Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de l'Ouest, t.21, 1867.

Selected bibliography

- La Trémoille, Charlotte-Amélie, comtesse d'Aldenbourg. Mémoires. Paris, 1876.
- La Trémoille, Henri, prince de Tarente. Mémoires. Liège, Bassompierre, 1767.
- La Trémoille, Louis, duc de. Les La Trémoille pendant cinq siècles. T.4: 1566-1709. Nantes, Grimaud, 1895.
- Tulot, Jean-Luc. "Les La Trémoille et le Protestantisme au XVIe et XVIIe siècle". Cahiers du Centre de Généalogie Protestante (à paraître).
- Weary, William. "The House of La Trémoille Fifteenth through Eighteenth Centuries: Change and Adaptations in a French Noble Family". Journal of Modern History, 40, 1977 ("on demand supplement").

Selected bibliography of images

- Anonyme. Portrait de Marie de La Tour d'Auvergne (gravure), à Paris chez Pierre Mariette, rue S. Iaques a l'Esperance. Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes (N2 D 184345).
- Moncornet, B. Portrait de Marie de La Tour (gravure). Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes (N2 D 184346-7).
- Anonyme. Recueil de dévises données à Marie de La Tour (40 emblèmes peints à l'aquarelle: parchemin, 40 ff, 320*250mm, reliure maroquin rouge à ses armes). Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal (MS 5217 Rés).

Reception

- "Mme de La Trémouille qui étoit habile et ambitieuse, vouloit que son mari fût prince, comme issu par femme de Charlotte d'Aragon, héritière du royaume de Naples. Elle crut que pour parvenir à ses desseins il falloit faire quelque mal ou quelque peur au ministre; et comme ils sont grands seigneurs, et qu'ils avoient beaucoup de crédit et de puissance dans leur province, il leur fut aisé d'émouvoir des troubles en leur pays" (Mémoires de Mme de Motteville, éd. Michaud et Pouloulat, Paris, 1838, p.262).
- "Thessalonice [Mme de La Trémoille] et sa fille sont deux prétieuses de grande naissance, l'une du temps de Valere [Voiture], l'autre encore aujourd'huy une des agreables personnes de son siècle. Elle écrit galamment en prose, et elle a fait elle-mesme son portrait" (Antoine Baudeau sieur de Somaize, Dictionnaire des précieuses, éd. Ch.-L. Livet, Paris, 1856, t.1, p.231).
- "Mme de La Trémoille est une des plus illustres dames de ce siècle, mais la mauvaise fortune de sa maison et ses indispositions sont causes que tout le monde n'a pas le bonheur de la connoître" (Mémoires de Mlle de Montpensier, éd. A. Chéruel, Paris, Charpentier, 1858, t.1, chapitre 19).
- "d'un esprit élevé, qui sait se faire obéir dans l'étendue de ses terres, jusqu'à établir des droits indus et à faire tout trembler sous son autorité" (C. Colbert de Croissy, "Etat du Poitou", in C. Dugast-Matifeux, État du Poitou sous Louis XIV, Fontenay-le-Comte, 1865, p.94-95).
- "sa femme [Marie de La Tour] était digne fille de son père, et digne soeur de ses frères; elle se garda bien de laisser faire son fils catholique: le père l'était, c'était assez. [...] la duchesse de La Trémoille, leur soeur, [...] était ravie de les voir si proches de ce qu'ils s'étaient toujours proposé en agitant si continuellement la France; mais, parmi la joie des avantages si immenses que ses frères étaient sur le point d'obtenir pour eux et pour leur maison, elle ne laissait pas d'être peinée de voir son mari demeuré en arrière, et de ne pas devenir prince comme eux" (Mémoires du duc de Saint-Simon, éd. Y. Coirault, Paris, 1983-8, t.3, p.50-2).