In fact, the reader does not need to have more than the vaguest idea of the historical context: the best way to start reading The Women’s War is to go with the flow and simply to laugh at the list of combatants – king, queen, clergy, noblemen and their mistresses – without worrying too much who is who – when, in Book I, Chapter II, Cauvignac remarks to the Duke d’Epernon:
‘At the moment, Monsieur de Mazarin is fighting for the queen, you are fighting for the king, the coadjutor is fighting for Monsieur de Beaufort, Monsieur de Beaufort is fighting for Madame de Montbazon, Monsieur de La Rochefoucauld is fighting for Madame de Longueville, the Duke d’Orléans is fighting for Mademoiselle Soyon, the parliament is fighting for the people… and, finally, they have imprisoned Monsieur de Condé who was fighting for France.’
And yet, at the same time, as one gets deeper into the story, the desire grows to know about the history behind it. How far is Dumas sticking to the facts? Where did he get his material? Were the characters that he depicts historical or invented? Were they really as he depicts them? It is because he invites us to ask such questions that Dumas has been said to have taught history to the people, and the translator and editor of his work may have a responsibility to answer some of the questions or to suggest how they can be answered – hence the cluster of notes generated by Cauvignac’s cynically humorous analysis of the forces on all sides in the Fronde.
Despite that, the history is secondary. Dumas had no doubt about what he was doing: he was writing a romance. But, like the background to the novel, the majority of the characters are taken from history or inspired by historical reality. In the Women’s War, the opposing forces were conveniently balanced. On the royalist side there was the queen and her young son, King Louis XIV; on the side of the Fronde, the princess and her young son, the Duke d’Enghien. The royalist forces also include the politician Mazarin and the soldier Marshal de La Meilleraie, while among the Frondeurs we have the princess’s councillor, Pierre Lenet, and the Duke de La Rochefoucauld, one of the military leaders of the rebellion. Other historical characters play secondary roles, and one quite minor figure, the Baron de Canolles, becomes the hero of the story.
To this historical background, Dumas pins his imaginary characters, the most prominent of whom are the two heroines of the novel: the humbly born Nanon de Lartigues, who has made her way in the world as mistress of the ageing Duke d’Epernon, and the aristocratic Claire, Viscountess de Cambes, lady-in-waiting to the Princess de Condé. These two, on opposite sides in the civil war, are also rivals for the love of Canolles. And then, among the important fictional characters, we have Nanon’s brother, the mercenary Cauvignac, who happily changes sides according to the interests of the moment. Cauvignac’s optimism and cynical attitude to the conflict take us back to the happy-go-lucky world of Dumas’s musketeers.
Finally, there is a secondary cast of both real and invented characters who closely resemble figures from theatrical comedy: the Duke d’Epernon, Nanon’s protector, is given the role of the foolish old man in love with a much younger woman (a stock figure in stage comedy). Madame de Tourville, one of the princess’s ladies-in-waiting and advisers, believes herself to be a brilliant military strategist, and is constantly proposing unworkable or inappropriate plans of action; she is a kind of précieuse ridicule, a bluestocking who makes herself ludicrous by her pretensions. Claire de Cambes’s servant, Pompée, is a veteran of earlier wars who boasts of his prowess (another stock figure in comedy since classical times), until he is confronted with actual danger, when bravado gives way to common sense and he takes to his heels. More unusual is the innkeeper, Biscarros, who runs a small country inn, but exhibits a chef’s pride in his cooking; Dumas, a considerable gourmet, may even have based him on an acquaintance.
One character, who is in fact historical, is fictionalized to such an extent that Dumas reinvents him: Pierre Lenet, about whom relatively little is known. His family had been in the service of the house of Condé for many years, and Lenet became an adviser to the Princess de Condé; he is remembered chiefly because he wrote a long, wordy memoir of the events in which he took part – readable only because of its authenticity as a first-hand account. Dumas transforms this rather dull character into someone far more interesting: a clever politician who will, despite his political skills, become one of the moral pillars of the narrative.
The years leading up to the time when Dumas wrote his historical novels, the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy, from 1815 to 1848, saw a new delight in history and historical writing. Writers and scholars in the previous century had taken an antiquarian interest in sources, digging up old memoirs and histories, and republishing them in collections such as the Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, which was produced by the Benedictines of Saint-Maur between 1738 and 1752; others in that period felt a philosophical desire to comprehend the general movement of human history: the reasons for the rise and fall of empires, for example, or the whole course of human development through time, which was often seen as mirroring the progress of an individual from childhood towards maturity. But the upheavals of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire (the period of Dumas’s childhood) disturbed the notion of a smooth evolution towards enlightenment, while giving historians an urgent desire to understand the workings of cause and effect. So the increase in the number of writings on history during the period after the fall of Napoleon had to do partly with a desire to understand the past and to make sense of the changes that the country had gone through in the previous thirty years, but there was also a broader interest in historical events for their own sake, and (as Claude-Bernard Petitot, editor of a collection of memoirs on the history of France published in 1824,7 remarks) no earlier period in French history had been so productive of historical memoirs as the seventeenth century, and in particular the period of the Fronde.
The new tendency in historical writing was towards smaller narratives: history as a succession of meaningful events, regardless of how these fitted into the broader pattern of human development. This was consistent, too, with the rise during the nineteenth century of nationalist feeling: rather than universal histories, writers and their public were interested in narratives shaped by particular localities and customs – and nothing catered to this better than the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott. In his romantic tales, set against authentic historical backgrounds and mixing real and imaginary characters, Scott found a winning formula for historical fiction. From the moment of the translation of his novel Quentin Durward into French in 1823 Scott’s work was immensely popular across the Channel. And Quentin Durward, being set in France at the time of Louis XI, was particularly successful among French readers.
Scott’s first French imitator was Alfred de Vigny, with a novel describing events from the seventeenth century. Cinq-Mars (1826) is the story of the conspiracy of the nobility against Cardinal Richelieu, led by the tragic figure of the young Marquis de Cinq-Mars (the conspiracy is mentioned by Dumas in The Women’s War). This novel was followed, among others, by Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), a fifteenth-century tale in which the cathedral becomes one of the chief protagonists. What is unusual about both these novels is that they set out not only to tell a good story, or even to recount historical events, but to use fiction as a means to explore the workings of human society in its historical context. Vigny, for example, sees Cinq-Mars’s conspiracy as a tragic failure of the nobility in its struggle for power with the monarchy, leading eventually to the absolutism of Louis XIV. Hugo goes even further in interpretation of events, using the form of the novel for a sweeping account of historical change during a period when, as he sees it, the cathedral, with its stories in stone, was giving way to the printed word as a means of what we would now call ‘mass communication’. From the nineteenth century Hugo looks back to the Middle Ages, then often considered as a period of barbarism, with what is almost nostalgia for an age when the great cathedrals, with their carvings and stained glass windows, co
uld be understood as vast encyclopedias of human knowledge.8
Dumas had no grand aim of this kind. He looked at the past less as a great edifice to be restored, than as a treasure house for plundering. The incident on which he bases The Women’s War is a good example of the kind of jewel that he hoped to uncover. But, nonetheless, as the saga of the three musketeers shows, he is capable of projected nostalgia: history is about time, time means change and change, however desirable overall, implies loss. When he and Maquet decided that they could do with another novel to cash in on the success of The Three Musketeers and its sequels, they were conscious of the moral dividing line that was perceived to exist between the reign of Louis XIII and that of his son, Louis XIV. The earlier period was seen as one of daring deeds and devotion to noble causes (such as the Cinq-Mars conspiracy), marked by passionate intrigue and intriguing, often illicit romance (for example, the affair between Queen Anne of Austria and the Duke of Buckingham). For Dumas, it represented a time governed by a spirit of adventure and freedom that he adored. The reign of Louis XIV, by contrast, was considered to be sober and marked by the influence of the austere doctrines of political absolutism and religious Jansenism. The latter was a movement within the Catholic Church, but one that, with its belief in predestination, had a good deal in common with puritanical Calvinism. One of those known to have been influenced by Jansenism was the Duke de La Rochefoucauld, who plays a significant role in The Women’s War.
La Rochefoucauld was the author of memoirs of the period of the Fronde, but his name is remembered today for a series of reflections on human nature and society, the Maxims (1665). These take the form of pithy observations, such as: ‘People prefer to speak ill about themselves than not to speak about themselves at all’; or ‘Society more often rewards the appearance of merit than merit itself’; or ‘When our crimes are known only to us, they are soon forgotten.’ They betray a deeply disenchanted outlook on human motivation, a cynicism that accords with the Jansenist belief that most human beings are wicked and that virtue can only be attained by a few – and then only through God’s grace. La Rochefoucauld is one of the villains of The Women’s War, where Dumas depicts him as a man without human feeling or sympathy.
As a character in the novel, La Rochefoucauld’s first appearance is carefully prepared: we meet his name several times before he finally rides in, and when he does appear, we see him from the point of view of Claire, Viscountess de Cambes, as:
a horseman of modest height and dressed in an affectedly simple way… looking at her with bright little eyes, sunk like those of a fox. With his thick black hair, his slender, shifting lips, his bilious pallor and his woeful brow, the man aroused a feeling of melancholy in daylight, but after dark, he could well have inspired terror. (Book II, Chapter XI)
Before the novel ends, the viscountess will have had the opportunity to compare the character of La Rochefoucauld with that of Lenet, much to the advantage of the latter; we, as readers, are invited to adopt her point of view on these two powerful men.
Is The Women’s War a feminist novel? Though women play the leading roles, the answer, at least in the modern sense of the term, has to be no. It is the circumstances of the time that lead Anne of Austria and the princess to become so prominent in the affairs of state, and neither woman (as Dumas depicts them) is truly equal to the task. At one point, Dumas says explicitly: ‘It is one of the eternal ambitions of that half of the human race which is destined to seduce, that it aspires to exercise the rights of the half that is destined to command’ (Book III, Chapter XVIII). He could hardly make his feelings on that score more clear; and the character that he gives to both Anne of Austria and the Princess de Condé shows what, in his view, happens when women try to perform outside what he sees as their natural sphere. Both women come across as capricious, vain, unwilling to take advice and unnaturally hard-hearted. Neither of them, incidentally, seems to bear much relation to the historical personalities of the queen and the princess (as we shall later see, in the princess’s case, from the source materials in the Appendix).
On the other hand, it would be wrong to dismiss this as merely another nineteenth-century attack on women who aspire to achieve something other than to seduce. The two main female characters in the book, Claire de Cambes and Nanon de Lartigues, are both depicted as more than just the playthings of men. Both are competent and resourceful. Nanon, the brunette, has risen from humble beginnings to become the rich and influential mistress of a very powerful man. She has attracted some of the popular hatred directed against him, but has helped him to escape from attack and even protected him against the fury of the mob. Her spirit and good humour make her one of the most attractive characters in the novel.
Her rival, the fair-haired Claire de Cambes, is quite different in personality and background, but equally resourceful and almost as courageous when pressed. She does not mind riding around the countryside, with only her timorous old servant for company, and dressed in men’s clothes. This is not by any means the typical heroine of nineteenth-century fiction – even though, as the representative of beauty and intelligence, as opposed to Nanon’s sensuality and generosity, she is the more constrained by convention.
Above all, what comes across at every point of the narrative, is Dumas’s affectionate respect for the two women he has created. He may feel that it is inappropriate for women to meddle in affairs of state or war, but that does not mean that he has any less regard for the qualities of women as individuals. On the contrary: the people that Dumas despises most – whether in affairs of state, in love or in war – are the cold, unfeeling politicians: Mazarin and La Rochefoucauld. They are the empty beings who manipulate others and are themselves manipulated in this game of move and counter-move. By contrast, as the critic Pierre Marcabru said in his review of The Women’s War, there is nothing cold or unfeeling about Nanon and Claire: they are ‘free women who, without neglecting their interests, go to the extremes of their passions, whether these are political or amorous’.9
Indeed, only one other character in the book seems to enjoy the same freedom as these two women: this is not Canolles, the ostensible hero, but Cauvignac, Nanon’s deplorable brother, who has no principles or loyalties, but switches sides whenever it appears to be to his advantage, relying on sheer effrontery to get him out of every scrape. There is no way, we think, that Dumas can approve of this outrageous character – and yet there is no way that he can have failed to enjoy him. This is a novel full of those scenes of humour and sheer enjoyment that are the hallmark of Dumas’s work, intrigues, disguises, mistaken identities, trickery and hoaxes, with battles and chases, trial and imprisonment…
Yet, despite his amorality, there are two reasons for seeing Cauvignac, not Canolles, as the story’s hero. The first is that he is the one character who, in the course of the narrative, shows that he is capable of change. Indeed, he comes to embody one of its messages, which is about the power of redemption. The other reason why Cauvignac is the key to the meaning of the novel, is that he better than anyone else expresses the futility of war. Certainly, the wars of the Fronde were particularly devoid of sense, being the outcome essentially of struggles for power between a few leading figures in the state – palace intrigue played out on a national stage. But Cauvignac, switching lightly from one side to the other, ends as the eternal adventurer, setting off for a colonial war with the remark that:
‘There is a war in Africa. Monsieur de Beaufort is off to fight the infidel, so I can go with him. To tell you the truth, it’s not as though I don’t think the infidels are a thousand times more in the right than the faithful, but what of it? That’s a matter for kings, not for us. You can get killed over there, which is all that matters to me.’ (‘Brother and Sister’)
There can be no doubt that Cauvignac is the masculine hero of this women’s war and the character closest to Dumas’s heart. On 30 November 2002, the remains of Alexandre Dumas were transferred to the Pantheon in Paris where they now lie beside those of his friend and
rival, Victor Hugo. The year for this transfer was chosen because it was the bicentenary of Dumas’s birth and the Dumas Society (Société des Amis d’Alexandre Dumas) had long been pressing for this honour for a writer whom they felt had been unjustly neglected by the country to which he had given so much.
This was not the first posthumous move for Dumas. He died near Dieppe, in Normandy, in 1870 and, because of the Franco-Prussian war, could not be buried at his home town of Villers-Cotterêts until 1872. His progress from there to the Pantheon was a triumphal one.
Addressing the coffin when it arrived in front of the Pantheon, President Chirac recalled the fact that Dumas was the grandson of a Haitian slave and deplored the racism that he had suffered; a wrong was being righted by his move to the temple which is the resting place of France’s great men and women. He also quoted a remark by the nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet, who told Dumas: ‘You have taught more history to the people than all historians put together.’ Most of us, he said, first read Dumas when we were young; he was the ‘yeast’ that got our imaginations working.