In a book addressing those interested in the transformation of
monarchy into the modern state and in intersections of gender and
political power, Katherine Crawford examines the roles of female
regents in early modern France.
The reigns of child kings loosened the normative structure in
which adult males headed the body politic, setting the stage for
innovative claims to authority made on gendered terms. When
assuming the regency, Catherine de Medicis presented herself as
dutiful mother, devoted widow, and benign peacemaker, masking her
political power. In subsequent regencies, Marie de Medicis and Anne
of Austria developed strategies that naturalized a regendering of
political structures. They succeeded so thoroughly that Philippe
d'Orleans found that this rhetoric at first supported but
ultimately undermined his authority. Regencies demonstrated that
power did not necessarily work from the places, bodies, or genders
in which it was presumed to reside.
While broadening the terms of monarchy, regencies involving
complex negotiations among child kings, queen mothers, and royal
uncles made clear that the state continued regardless of the
king--a point not lost on the Revolutionaries or irrelevant to the
fate of Marie-Antoinette.
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