"Femmes illustres": The Defense of Queenship and the Public Woman in Revolutionary France

In 1791, the Parisian publisher Pierre Blin sold two large, colored engravings of the Merovingian Queen Frédegonde detailing her virtues as an illustrious figure of French history. Two years later, Marie-Antoinette was formally accused of being a "new Frédegonde" in the trial that would take her life. Throughout the Revolution, history served as a field in which crucial elements of French identity were interpreted and debated. Blin's print series "Portraits des grands hommes et femmes illustres" of 1786-1792 was an active agent in negotiating questions of politics, society, and gender and posited French national history, including queens, as a space in which to do so. Queens were risky inclusions amongst the "great and illustrious" as Marie-Antoinette became a symbol of corruption, dissimulation, and conspiracy. The engravings represent potential threats of queenship condemned in contemporary pamphlets: foreigners, regents, and conspirators like Frédégonde. Deploying a popular visual vocabulary, Blin constructed a new image of queenship marked by service to the nation - a nation that, in this early Revolutionary moment, redefined service and leadership. Moreover, these prints mobilized the representation of powerful historical female rulers to defend the public woman. In representing the righteous violence of female heroes like Jeanne Laisné and Jeanne d'Arc and in supporting his female engraver Marie de Cernel, herself politically active, Blin's images defended women's place in the public, political community. The challenge the series posed to the vilification of queens became a challenge to the Revolutionary fraternity's exclusion of all women from the public sphere.