Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France (review)

Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France has a dual goal. Methodologically, it attempts to integrate the study of gender into our understanding of high politics by demonstrating that gender performance and prevalent notions about femininity and masculinity shaped the French monarchy's ability to wield power. As Katherine Crawford states, she hopes to explicate "how gendered assumptions allowed certain political moments to happen" (5). In addition, she seeks to rethink French political history by illustrating the surprising strength, malleability, and influence of France's repeated regencies: "Paradoxically, weakness and instability allowed regents to create new practices that strengthened the monarchy" (7). Ultimately, Crawford aims to intertwine these two levels of analysis and illustrate the centrality of gender politics to the construction of the French state. Ambitious in scope, the book spans the Old Regime monarchy from the 1560s until the Revolution and explores the regencies of three queen mothers (Catherine de Médicis, Marie de Médicis, and Anne of Austria), one male cousin (Philippe d'Orléans), and one not-quite-regent (Marie-Antoinette).

Crawford takes as her point of departure a fascinating characteristic of regencies that emerges from late medieval politics. At moments when the king was a minor, male relatives were suspected of wanting to increase their own powers or perhaps even bring about the king's demise so that they could inherit the throne themselves. The queen mother, meanwhile, had a weak position as a woman and a foreigner, but, as Crawford argues, her feminine weakness could be a strength. According to the Salic law, no woman could inherit the throne. Thus, a female regent had little reason to plot against the king's interests. She had no hope of gaining his crown; on the contrary, he was her only route to power. At the same time, she might be able to use the feminine attribute of maternal affection to substantiate beliefs that she would work on the king's behalf and indeed protect him far more selflessly than a male regent and potential rival ever could. In a strange twist, the Salic law worked against female heirs but in favor of female regents.

Building on this fundamental insight, Crawford offers a detailed and often provocative narrative, exploring how each of France's regents shaped her or his regency through political choices and, above all, through gendered self-presentation. Crawford weaves together traditional analysis of political machinations with insightful readings of royal imagery and propaganda. En route, she generates her own interpretations of various central issues in early modern French history, such as the nature of Richelieu's theory of state or the causes of instability surrounding the Estates General of 1614 or the Fronde.

Successive regents reinvented the institutions of monarchy and regency in these unstable contexts. Crawford shows, for example, how Catherine de Médicis played the role of sober widow and dutiful mother in order to carve out a legitimate model for female regents. Dressed in mourning for the thirty years between Henri II's death and her own, Catherine allegedly spouted tears at the mere mention of her deceased husband. More importantly, when her ten-year-old son, Charles IX, took the throne in 1560, she strategically positioned herself as his selfless mother whose maternal affection and protective instincts for her sons placed her above court factionalism: "[God] has left me with three young sons, and in a realm which is all divided. There isn't one sole person in whom I can completely trust, who does not have some particular passion" (quoted on 31). Portraying herself as the natural, familial caretaker, Catherine convinced the Estates General to expand her functions as guardian and administrator on behalf of her son. She orchestrated his coronation in 1561 to highlight noble submission to the youthful king and to stage harmony between aristocratic families, with herself as a feminine peacemaker. The queen mother's political maneuvers did not always succeed, especially as the...