Female Influence in France.

Auckland Star, Volume XVIII, Issue 143, 18 June 1887, Page 3 (Supplement)

Female Influence in France.

The.prominent.part female influence has all along 'playejl in the destinies of France has in some sense reduced the Salic law to a dead letter; Madame cle Girardin, e.rf:, observes that " ambition is the.whole life of French women, and' the attainment) pf.influenco the one subject of their dreams. It ■shows itself -even- in domestic life, where they generally manage to rule. A higher authority, Napoleon Bonaparte, hacl observed long before - when he came to Paris in 1795, after the downfall of bho old Bourbon Court, which had been the special theatre of their domination - that (' here only women are at the helm; a woman must be six months in Paris to know her power') they owe that position to their skill alike in noble and ignoble arts, and their readiness to be content with the reality of power without its outward trappings. The long line of French queens who ruled as widows and regents open with Blanche of Castile, mother of Louis IX., who displayed her marvellous energy in the conduct of a seven war.with the great vassals of the: kingdom, though she afterwards tarnished her fair fame by helping tq introduce the Inquisition into France. In that ; most turbulent and desperate crisis of national history, when the kingdom seemed' to. be falling to pieces under the feeble sway of Charles VI., two women—as different as light and darkness—are again prominent on the scene ; on the one hand the Queen, Isabella of Bavaria, a shameless wife and unnatural mother, who would have robbed her own son of his succession to the throne ; and on the other hand the Maid of Orleans, the deliverer of her country. From the death of Louis XI. female influence was constantly on the. increase, and we may designate tho century from 1484 to 1590—with the exception of Louis Xlt.'s reign-as the era of the ascendancy of women and favourites. The kings were either nobodies, or were under the thumb of their wives and mistresses; during tho youth of Charles VIII. his elder sister, Anne of Beaujpu, governed, who socmed to have inherited the political sagacity of her father. But the influence of Louis of Savoy over her son, Francis 1., was disastrous to the best interests of France. Under her, ib was said 'the women , —the King's favourites — 'made everything, even the generals,' and the bishop.?. "The next king, Henry 11., waa completely in the hands of a widow much older than himself, Diana of Poitiers. And thus we are brought to tho Italian and Machiavellian policy of Catherine de Medici and Mary, wife of Henry IV. and mother of Louis XIII. From both of them, as well as from tho Regent Anne and her foreign favourite, Mazarin, France had to learn to its cost the dangers and disasters of female supremacy. It ended in anarchy and treasonable compact with Spain, but served meanwhile to aggraiidiss tho absolutism of the Crown. And under the baneful influence of Anne and Cardinal Mazarin, Louis XIV. grew up in ignorance, pride, self-importance, and the habitual dependanco on female guidance which marked his character and conduct through life. It has been said, with much truth, that when, after the death of Mazarin, he took tho reins into his own hands, the modified despotism carried on by Richelieu and Mazarin was converted into a brutal tyranny, masked, for the time, by the glitter of military and intellectual glory, but which a century later provoked the terrible collapse of the whole ancient regime. "