The Princess and The Prince: gender, genre, and Lessons for My Daughter

Without the authority guaranteed by the title of regent, Anne of France nevertheless managed to wield her considerable power quite effectively during the years she governed France, but just how she managed to do so was not at all clear to her contemporaries, nor is it any more clear to us today. As her supporters and detractors struggled to explain the role she assumed after her father’s death, they had a great deal to say about her, but very little of what they said offered any analysis of her decisions or any insight into the political philosophy driving those decisions. Nor do her own words clarify the obscurity; only a handful of her letters survive, and they reveal neither motive nor method and only, on rare occasion, the merest of personal details. But the lack of information seems deliberate rather than accidental. Perhaps the most astute assessment of Anne of France’s methods remains that of the nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet: “It seems . . . that she took as much care to conceal her power as others do to show theirs.”

Given their inability to penetrate her opacity, her contemporaries were left at times stating the obvious. “Madame Anne de France . . . governed the person of the king,” one chronicler noted, while another remarked that she not only controlled the king but “all the realm”; “Madam Beaujeu . . . controlled the throne of France,” still another confirmed, adding that “the said lady . . . dispatched all the difficult business of the realm.” Still, there was more than just acknowledgment of her power; according to one observer, the great men of the realm were also “indignant.” She might be “sage, prudent, and virtuous,” or “one of the most beautiful and honest ladies that was ever known, and . . . [one] of the most wise and virtuous,” but she was still a woman, and “many were very unhappy that Anne, the sister of Charles, was preferred over others in matters of government.” In trying to explain Anne of France, her contemporaries thus came to focus on her sex rather than her abilities.