This thesis examines the memoirs of five French aristocratic women recording their experience of the French Revolution. These testimonies, titled Mémoires, Journal and Souvenirs, are those of the comtesse de Béarn, marquises de la Rochejaquelein and de la Tour du Pin, princesse de Tarente and duchesse de Tourzel. This thesis traces the memoirists’ narrative of the revolutionary decade, from its genesis in 1789 to the subsequent Terror, Vendée War, and eventual emigration. I analyse these five curated narratives in which the memoirists share their interpretations of the events they witnessed and participated in. I draw on their similarities and differences to foreground their various opinions, preoccupations and motivations.
This thesis is interdisciplinary and cross-national: I bring together literary and historical insights into aristocratic women’s active reaction and response to their daily domestic struggles, while also engaging with both French and English-speaking scholarly debates. The texts under study complicate our understanding of histories of the French Revolution, women’s history, treatments of the memoir and of French women writers. The thesis adopts a thematic approach to investigate the various aspects of the memoirists’ lives, tackling family life, Court life and life as an émigrée. I proceed by case study, putting these hitherto underdiscussed texts in dialogue with each other for the first time. Moreover, I address the memoirs’ role as a repository of disruptive feelings, as, written between 1792 and 1843, they enabled these women to make sense of and bring structure to their traumatic experience, all the while as they avoided publication and its potentially dangerous repercussions.
Ultimately, I argue that aristocratic women were capable of agency, displaying it both during the French Revolution itself and years later when writing their memoirs, eschewing the gender and social restrictions which would have seen them be passive and confined to the domestic circle.
