Des discours de la discorde : les femmes, la Fronde et l’écriture de l’histoire

• Main Author: Sophie Vergnes
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institut du Monde Anglophone 2011-04-01
• Series: Etudes Epistémè
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/627

Deeply shocked by the Fronde, Louis XIV tried to erase it from a history that was to be written under his control. Nevertheless, voices rose to restore the memory of the civil war, by insisting above all on the great mixing of men and women that characterised the spheres of power during the political turmoil. The memorialists of the Fronde, men or women, contributed to this, just as the Frondeuses themselves did in their glory days by writing various texts (letters, pamphlets, manifestos) intended to show them at their best. The Grande Mademoiselle, one of the most active Frondeuses, not only left evidence of her own action but also wanted to write its history and give it a meaning in her Memoirs. Such a text, voluntarily biased and committed, seemed to foil Louis XIV’s will for supremacy and to challenge the restored patriarchal order. It gave, in any case, an alternative, feminine – and to some extent feminist – view of the Great Rule.