The Women's War
Alexandre Dumas
THE WOMEN’S WAR
ALEXANDRE DUMAS was born in 1802 at Villers-Cotterêts. His father, the illegitimate son of a marquis, was a general in the Revolutionary armies, and died when Dumas was only four. Dumas was brought up in straitened circumstances and received very little education. He joined the household of the future king, Louis-Philippe, and began reading voraciously. Later he entered the cénacle of Charles Nodier and started writing. In 1829 the production of his play, Henri III et sa cour, heralded twenty years of successful playwriting. In 1839 he turned his attention to writing historical novels, often using collaborators such as Auguste Maquet to suggest plots or historical background. His most successful novels are The Count of Monte Cristo, which appeared during 1844–5, and The Three Musketeers, published in 1844. Other novels deal with the wars of religion and the Revolution. Dumas wrote many of these for the newspapers, often in daily instalments, marshalling his formidable energies to produce ever more in order to pay off his debts. In addition, he wrote travel books, children’s stories and his Mémoires, which describe most amusingly his early life, his entry into Parisian literary circles and the 1830 Revolution. He died in 1870.
ROBIN BUSS is a writer and translator who contributes regularly to The Times Educational Supplement, The Times Literary Supplement and other papers. He studied at the University of Paris, where he took a degree and a doctorate in French literature. He is part-author of the article ‘French Literature’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica and has published critical studies of works by Vigny and Cocteau, and three books on European cinema, The French through Their Films (1988), Italian Films (1989) and French Film Noir (1994). He is also part-author of a biography, in French, of King Edward VII (with Jean-Pierre Navailles, published by Payot, Paris, 1999). He has translated a number of other volumes for Penguin, including The Count of Monte Cristo, Jean Paul Sartre’s Modern Times, Zola’s L’Assommoir, Au Bonheur des Dames and Thérèse Raquin, and Albert Camus’s The Plague.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
The Women’s War
Translated with an Introduction and Notes
by ROBIN BUSS
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First published 1844
Published in Penguin Classics 2006
1
Translation and Notes copyright © Robin Buss, 2006
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EISBN: 978–0–141–91203–5
Contents
Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the Text
The Women’s War
Appendix
Notes
Chronology
1802 Alexandre Dumas is born at Villers-Cotterêts, the third child of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas. His father, the illegitimate son of a marquis and a slave girl of San Domingo, had been a general in the Republican, then in the Napoleonic armies.
1806 General Dumas dies. Alexandre and his mother, Elisabeth Labouret, are left virtually penniless.
1822 Dumas takes a post as a clerk.
1823 Granted a sinecure on the staff of the Duke d’Orléans. Meets the actor Françoise Joseph Talma and starts to mix in artistic and literary circles, writing sketches for the popular theatre.
1824 Dumas’s son, Alexandre, future author of La Dame aux camélias, is born as the result of an affair with a seamstress, Catherine Lebay.
1829 Dumas’s historical drama, Henri III et sa cour, is produced at the Comédie-Française. It is an immediate success, marking Dumas out as a leading figure in the Romantic movement.
1830 Victor Hugo’s drama Hernani becomes the focus of the struggle between the Romantics and the traditionalists in literature. In July, the Bourbon monarchy is overthrown and replaced by a new regime under the Orléanist King Louis-Philippe. Dumas actively supports the insurrection.
1831 Dumas’s melodrama Antony, with its archetypal Romantic hero, triumphs at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin.
1832 Dumas makes a journey to Switzerland which will form the basis of his first travel book, published the following year.
1835 Travels extensively in Italy.
1836 Triumph of Dumas’s play Kean, based on the personality of the English actor whom he had seen performing in Shakespeare in 1828.
1839 Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle, Dumas’s greatest success in the theatre, is staged.
1840 Dumas marries Ida Ferrier. Travels down the Rhine with Gérard de Nerval; they collaborate on the drama Léo Burckart. Nerval introduces Dumas to Auguste Maquet, who will become his collaborator on many subsequent works.
1844 The Three Musketeers begins to appear in serial form in March, the first episodes of The Count of Monte Cristo in August. Dumas starts to build his Château de Monte-Cristo at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Separates from Ida Ferrier. Publishes The Women’s War.
1845 Twenty Years After, the first sequel to The Three Musketeers, appears at the beginning of the year. In February Dumas wins a libel action against the author of a book accusing him of plagiarism. Publishes La Reine Margot.
1846 Travels in Spain and North Africa. Publishes La Dame de Monsoreau, Les Deux Diane and Joseph Balsamo.
1847 Dumas’s theatre, the Théâtre Historique, opens. It will show several adaptations of his novels, including The Three Musketeers and La Reine Margot. Serialization of The Vicomte de Bragelonne, the final episode of the The Three Musketeers.
1848 A revolution in February brings in the Second Republic. Dumas stands unsuccessfully for Parliament and supports Louis-Napoléon, nephew of Napoleon I, who becomes President of the Republic.
1849 Publishes The Queen’s Necklace. In May travels to Holland to attend the coronation of King William III.
1850 The Black Tulip is published. Dumas, declared bankrupt, sells the Château de Monte-Cristo and the Théâtre Historique.
1851 In December Louis-Napoléon seizes power in a coup d’état, effectively abolishing the Republic. Victor Hugo, joined by Dumas, goes into exile in Belgium.
1852 Second Empire proclaimed. Dumas publishes his memoirs.
1853 In November returns
to Paris and founds a newspaper, Le Mousquetaire. Publishes Ange Pitou.
1858 Founds the literary weekly Le Monte-Cristo. Sets out on a nine-month journey to Russia.
1860 Meets Garibaldi and actively supports the Italian struggle against Austria. Founds L’Independente, a periodical in Italian and French. Garibaldi is godfather to Dumas’s daughter by Emilie Cordier.
1861–70 Continues to travel throughout Europe. Writes six plays, thirteen novels, several shorter fictions, a historical work on the Bourbons in Naples and a good deal of journalism. Has a last love affair, with an American, Adah Menken.
1870 Dumas dies on 5 December.
Introduction
Alexandre Dumas was an impressively prolific and varied writer. He wrote poetry, plays, novels, historical works, travel books, memoirs and even a couple of books on cookery, as well as huge amounts of journalism (some of it in the periodical Le Monte-Cristo, which he also edited), political writings and pamphlets. A leading figure in the Romantic movement, through his work as a playwright during the 1830s, he pioneered the form of the feuilleton (serial fiction published in the newspapers). In the following decade, he concentrated on fiction, writing over thirty novels and many shorter narratives in what seems an impossibly brief period of time. Today, over 130 years after his death, several of these works remain bestsellers in France and in translation throughout the world: The Three Musketeers (1844, and its sequels); The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–5); The Black Tulip (1850) and La Reine Margot (1845). But these books represent only a fraction of Dumas’s incredible output and, despite the enduring popularity of his work, he remains a continent of which most of us know only a corner. There is a huge amount there waiting to be rediscovered – and a lot that is well worth discovering.
The Women’s War (La Guerre des femmes) is one of those books. It last appeared in English (in a reprint of a nineteenth-century translation) during the 1920s,1 and had even been out of print in French for many years before it was republished in 2003. When this new French edition appeared, it was an immediate success. The weekly magazine Télérama2 called the novel ‘a great Dumas’, the daily La Marseillaise3 hailed it as ‘a great, forgotten Dumas’, and the newpaper Le Figaro’s literary supplement4 made La Guerre des femmes its ‘book of the week’ and devoted an article of several columns to this ‘forgotten novel’ – the words ‘forgotten’ and ‘great’ echoed through the French press, and readers hurried out to buy it.5 The publisher, Phébus, set about remedying similar literary oversights and in 2004 brought out another of Dumas’s neglected historical novels, Sylvandire. In France, gradually, the Dumas continent is being opened up.
The wonderful thing about this recent revival of interest is that it allows one to read the ‘new’ works with a real sense of discovery. Because of their very popularity, the plots of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo are known to many people before they even open the books, either from hearsay or from adaptations in other media: The Count of Monte Cristo, for example, is one of the most frequently adapted novels in the history of cinema and many people know the outlines of the story of Edmond Dantès, his unjust imprisonment and his re-emergence as the vengeful count. By contrast, very few readers who pick up this book will know anything about the story, which is based on an actual incident during the period of civil unrest in sixteenth-century France known as the Fronde. For that reason, it would be unfair in this introduction to give away details of the plot, so I have decided to discuss only the broader historical background and the characters of the novel here. But because it is instructive to see how Dumas and his collaborator, Auguste Maquet, made use of the raw material of history, and because the facts on which the novel is based are interesting in themselves, I am including as an appendix some historical material: four extracts from seventeenth-century memoirs and one from a nineteenth-century history of the period that would have been available to Dumas. This present introduction should be helpful in explaining what was going on politically and socially at the time of The Women’s War and why the different factions in France were in conflict.
Some admirers of Dumas find it hard to accept the fact that he used collaborators (of whom Auguste Maquet was the most important), but he never denied that he had assistants, just as a Renaissance painter would not dispute that he used apprentices to fill in details of a picture. Dumas was no great stickler for historical accuracy, either; he saw the events and characters of history as a springboard for his imagination, not as a field for minute exploration, so Maquet and others would be entrusted with a lot of the spadework: obtaining historical background material, verifying facts and writing some chapters (though there is still uncertainty about how much was done by assistants and how much by Dumas himself). Almost at one and the same time, the Dumas factory would be devising and writing novels on very different historical periods: the sixteenth-century wars of religion (La Reine Margot), the seventeenth century (The Three Musketeers) and the nineteenth-century empire and Restoration (The Count of Monte Cristo). It may be that Dumas came across accounts of the episode around which The Women’s War was based, while doing research for his history of Louis XIV and his times (which also led to the Three Musketeers trilogy), and marked it for separate use. The novel first appeared in serial form in 1844, a few months after The Three Musketeers.
Dumas had a particular liking for the seventeenth century, and the idea of a novel set at the time of the so-called Women’s War, as a means to stay in the period and to cash in on the success of his trilogy, would have been attractive to him. It was a period of drama, intrigue and civil unrest. The troubles of the Fronde were the outcome of the political situation in France following the death, in 1643, of King Louis XIII. His son and heir was only five years old, and Louis XIII’s widow, Queen Anne of Austria, daughter of King Philip III of Spain, was unpopular in France, not least because her country of adoption was at war with her country of origin: they were to remain in conflict until 1659. The queen had also attracted hostility because of her long estrangement from her late husband, giving rise to doubts about the paternity of their child – though it seems that these doubts were unjustified: historians have proved that a series of remarkable coincidences, including a thunderstorm, brought the couple together in the same bed at the very time when the future Louis XIV was conceived.6
No less unpopular was the country’s chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin. Like Anne, he was a foreigner: born Giulio Mazzarini, he had come to France from Italy as papal envoy in 1634, before being appointed an assistant to Cardinal Richelieu, and rapidly gaining in power and influence thanks to Richelieu’s support. After the death of Louis XIII, Anne and Mazarin were made members of a regency council, which was empowered to govern the country until her son was old enough to rule. The late king’s younger brother. Gaston d’Orléans, who until the birth of Louis XIV in 1638 had been heir to the throne, was also a member of the council, as was the late king’s cousin, the Duke d’Enghien, later Prince de Condé. The presence on this council of a disappointed heir and a powerful prince almost guaranteed discord.
Popular dislike of what was seen as rule by the two foreigners, Anne and Mazarin, may have been an underlying cause of the unrest, but the most important one was the ambition of a group of powerful nobles around Gaston d’Orléans, who had been long preparing to succeed his sick brother and confidently expected to do so because of the estrangement of Louis XIII and Anne. Even before the king’s death, there had been opposition to the ruthless rule of Richelieu and the concentration of power in an absolute monarchy. This unrest had culminated in the conspiracy of the Marquis de Cinq-Mars, a young favourite of the king and Richelieu who quarrelled with the cardinal and decided to form a conspiracy against him, in collaboration with France’s enemy Spain: the discovery of letters from the Spanish king promising to support Cinq-Mars proved the conspiracy and the marquis was beheaded in 1642. But the deaths in the following year, within a few months of each other, of both Richelieu and the king, left a serious powe
r vacuum in the country.
The situation began to deteriorate in the late 1640s with growing conflict between the regency and the Paris parlement. The parlements were in essence judiciary bodies, composed of local magistrates, which acted as a higher court in Paris and in most important towns in the provinces. However, as well as their legal function, they also had administrative powers; and, even though they could be overruled by the king and were not in any way democratically elected, they considered themselves to represent the popular will. Given the precariousness of the situation in the country, a conflict between the Paris parlement and the regency was bound to be a source of serious instability.
Mazarin’s arrest of the leading members of the Paris parlement in 1648 led to riots: slingshots hurled at the windows of Mazarin’s supporters resulted in the anti-Mazarin movement being christened the Fronde – fronde meaning ‘a sling’. In January 1649, following the peace of Westphalia, the Prince de Condé’s army returned from the war against Spain, and took the side of the Parisian mob against Mazarin. For a while, it looked as though there might be an accommodation between the Frondeurs and Mazarin, but relations broke down again when Mazarin felt that he was strong enough to confront his opponents. In January 1650 he carried out a sudden coup against the Frondeurs, having the three princes, Condé, Conti and Longueville unexpectedly arrested. This move against the great Condé, responsible for French victories at Rocroi and elsewhere, was especially shocking. With her husband under arrest, the Princess de Condé became the leader of the insurrection. Opposing her, as it were at the head of the royalist side, was the Queen Regent, Anne of Austria. The stage was set for the Women’s War.
On the face of it, the queen’s side was by far the stronger, since she had the government and Mazarin behind her. But support for the Frondeurs was potentially strong in the south-west, especially around what was then France’s second city, Bordeaux. The feelings of the people in the region had been aggravated by food shortages (this was an agriculturally poor region), and the parlement in Bordeaux had fallen out with the Governor of the province of Guyenne, the Duke d’Epernon. However, conciliatory moves during 1649 by both d’Epernon and Mazarin had apparently warded off the threat of rebellion, until the imprisonment of the princes. It remained to be seen how the Bordeaux parlement would react. The Princess de Condé and her followers were being kept under virtual house arrest at Chantilly, but if Bordeaux was sympathetic to their cause and if they could somehow make their way there, the region would provide an invaluable base for rebellion against Mazarin. This, in essence, is the situation when Dumas’s novel opens.
