Female Influence in France.

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 208, 25 June 1887, Page 7

Female Influence in France.

The prominent part female influence has all along played in the destinies of France has in some sense reduced the Sali,c law to a dead letter. Madame de Girarcliri, e.g., observes that " ambition is the whole life of French women, and the attainment) of influence the one subject of their dreams. It shows itself even in domestic life, where they generally manage to rule. A higher authority, Napoleon Bonaparte, had observed long; betore -when he came to Paris in 1795, after the downfall of the 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 poAver') 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 years' war with the great vassals of the kingdom, though she afterwards tarnished her fair fame by helping to 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 tho throne ; and on tho othor hand the Maid of Orleans, the deliverer of her country. From tho death of Louis XL female influence was constantly on the increase, and we may designate tho century from 148-A to 1590— with tho exception of Louis XII. 's reign— a? 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 the youth of Charles VIII. his elder sister, Anne of Beaujou, governed, who seemed to havo inherited tho political sagacity of her father. But tho influence of Louis of Savoy over her son, Francis 1. , was disnstixms to the best interests of France. Under her, it was said ' the women ' — the King's favourites — ' made everything, even the generals,' and tho bishops. The next king, Henry 11., was completely in the hands of a widow much older than himself, Diana of Poitiers. And thus we are brought to the Italian and Machiavellian policy of Catherine de Medici and Mary, wife of Henry IV. and mother of Loui3 XIII. From both of them, as well as from the Regent Anno and her foreign favourite, Mazarin, France had to learn to its cost the dangers and disasters of female supremacy. Ifc ended in anarchy and treasonable compact with Spain, but served meanwhile to aggrandisa the 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 dependance 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 the 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."