Des Méridionales à la cour : l’exemple des demoiselles de Saint‑Cyr (1686‑1793)

Abstract

Saint-Cyr is certainly not Versailles, but there was a close proximity between the Maison royale de Saint-Louis (known simply as Saint-Cyr) and the palace, links that were not merely geographic. Reserved for the daughters of impoverished French nobility, Saint-Cyr was created in 1686 from the convergence between Madame de Maintenon’s passion for education and the Sun King’s political will to win the fidelity of a social category now known by historians as the ‘noblesse seconde’. During the reign of Louis XIV, support for the school was strong, but it was more subdued during the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI, though support was always present. Based on Preuves de la noblesse des demoiselles (Evidence of the nobility of the young women), conserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) and on papers from the Saint-Cyr Archives in the Department of Yvelines, we can locate the place of baptism — comparable to place of birth — of 3,155 students who attended Saint-Cyr until its closing in 1793. Among these, 413 were born in the South of France. To make a portrait of these Southerners, three axes are used: the place, or region, in the south, where the girls came from, the nobility of their families’ lineage and these former students’ destinies, particularly whether or not they returned to their native areas.

Keywords

• gender history
• girls’ education
• lineage
• nobility
• Royal house of Saint-Louis
• royal lines