Searching for the Amazons

by John Man

  There was little room in the scientific, rationalist view for God, certainly for the God of the established churches. Of course, the revolution would take time. God and his churches remained part of thought and society, and out-and-out atheism was unusual. But religious influence would surely wane as knowledge grew. If there were still mysteries – natural catastrophes, for instance, like the earthquake that devastated Lisbon in 1756 – they should be addressed by Science. That was the way to fulfil humanity’s destiny: to seek happiness, avoid misery, make Progress.

  In France, intellectuals believed the way forward was to acquire knowledge step by step, not just about science but about the world and other societies. Their big idea, spearheaded by Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert, was a vast compilation of information, an encyclopaedia, thirty-five volumes of which were published between 1751 and 1772. This was the ‘war machine’ (as one of its 150 authors, known as the Encyclopédistes, put it) that would inform and change minds, spreading ideas that were believed to be universal. Thus ignorance and intolerance would vanish, the laws of nature and society would stand revealed, and mankind would advance in the interests of all. So the new priesthood of intellectuals, the philosophes, believed, along with their co-‘philosophers’ in England, Scotland, Italy and Germany.

  Why France? The main answer is Louis XIV. When he died in 1715, he had ruled for seventy-two years and pursued the nation’s interest and his own ruthlessly and brilliantly. The rays of the Sun King glowed over all Europe, as well as burning a lot of it. Power and prestige meant that all Europe spoke French. But he was a despot, as his heirs Louis XV and XVI also wished to be, rather less successfully. Power also constrained. If the king ruled by divine right, if God was on his side, how could he permit the toleration for which the philosophes wished? He couldn’t. Intellectuals and artists faced many barriers. Their ideas would have to await another sort of revolution, the violent one of 1789, before they could be taken further.

  For sceptics like Voltaire and the Encyclopédistes, Amazons were not considered a serious subject, at least not by many. A cleric, Claude Guyon, in his two-volume history of the Amazons,35 insisted that ‘there is no nation more celebrated, more remarkable or better attested’; the scientist and explorer Charles Marie de la Condamine was sure they were to be found in South America; Joseph Lafitau, the one who had actually worked with Iroquois Indians, insisted that all native Americans were descended from ancient races, including the Amazons. Voltaire said it was all rubbish: ‘The Kingdom of the Amazons, on the banks of the Thermodon, is nothing more than a poetic fiction.’ Across the Channel, Edmund Gibbon was more discreet in his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Commenting on the AD 274 victory parade of the Roman emperor Aurelian with its long train of captives, he writes that ‘the title of Amazons was bestowed on ten martial heroines of the Gothic nation’, to which he adds a careful footnote: ‘It is almost impossible that a society of Amazons should ever have existed.’

  But still they were there, lodged in the European consciousness, appealing to the poetic imagination, and finding an outlet through the pen of a woman, one of those remarkable eighteenth-century women who were widely responsible for the spread of Enlightenment ideas.

  Just as important as books, letters and lectures were the Parisian drawing rooms of the rich and influential. In these salons, the dominant personalities were the women. The salons had a century of tradition behind them, looking back to Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, in the early seventeenth century. She set up a sort of counter-court, free of courtly constraints, emphasizing the arts of conversation – politeness, tact, culture, intimacy. She and later hostesses – salonnières – invited guests who, above all, had to be interesting. Neither wealth nor social standing was enough. The idea was to discuss and spread what was new in literature, science, art, politics, thought and society, exploring themes like friendship, marriage, love and independence. They chaired, encouraged, entertained, facilitated and educated themselves, becoming people of influence on behalf of culture. They taught the ‘womanly virtues’ by example, aiming to ‘purge men of the boorish Academy legacy which weighed on them, in which the purpose was to crush others with the weight of one’s learning.’36 Thanks to these intelligent, ambitious women, clever members of both sexes intermingled, and all found they were the better for doing so.

  The name of the salonnière in question is Madame du Boccage. Born Anne-Marie le Page in Rouen, she moved to Paris at twenty-three with her tax-collector husband, who liked books and ideas. She was obviously and notoriously brilliant, intellectually and socially. She knew Latin, Greek and several modern languages. She set up a salon, achieving no great fame until in 1746, at the age of thirty-six, she wrote a poem that won her first prize from the Academy – the good-and-great of the local intellectuals – in her home town of Rouen. She sent the poem to Voltaire, who liked it so much he wrote back addressing her as the ‘Sappho of Normandy’, referring to her poetic abilities, but perhaps implying more, for reasons we will get to later. A fellow Norman recommended her to the philosopher Fontenelle, still feisty at the age of ninety, who introduced her to the playwright Pierre de Marivaux. The boost to her salon seems to have injected ambition and released talent.

  Two years later, she finished a French version of the first half of Milton’s Paradise Lost. That’s some 5,000 lines from very demanding English, not bad going for anyone, and for a woman in such male-dominated times quite extraordinary. The next person to try it, 100 years later, was the diplomat, historian and Romantic writer Châteaubriand. It was a task ‘I would never have imposed on myself,’ he wrote afterwards, ‘if I had known what was involved.’ He spoke perfect English, having lived there for eight years, and his translation was in prose. Hers, though an ‘imitation’, as she called it, rather than a translation, was in twelve-syllable rhyming Alexandrines, the form sanctioned by two centuries of use. It was not great; but it was an achievement, and admired enough for her to continue writing.

  Her medium now became the stage, her subject the Amazons. As few took them seriously, since her friend Voltaire said they had never existed, we have to ask: why? One answer, almost certainly, is that she took them seriously because la Condamine, just back from travelling the length of the Amazon, was a friend. It was he, remember, who said he had almost seen Amazons, was convinced that they had once existed, and guessed they might still exist beyond a horizon yet to be explored. That was good enough for Madame du Boccage. Of course, she was not going to write about an unrecorded tribe of Indians in Amazonia. She picked up the old stories from classical Greece and changed things to suit herself and to explore contemporary themes: the nature of the state, the importance of law, the dangers of emotion.

  Les Amazones, written in a year, tells the story of how Queen Orithya, who has captured Theseus – that’s her invention: these Greeks are losers not victors – falls in love with him and commits suicide because she has infringed the laws of the state. The theme is mainstream Enlightenment. But du Boccage’s other purpose was to advance the cause of women by providing an example of female creativity. She says as much in a rhyming dedication ‘To Women’, urging them to focus not on looks and subservience, but on ‘character and language’:

  Consider that the seductive charms

  Of your character and language

  Enslave more hearts

  Than were ever subjugated

  By the brave heroines of the ancient world.

  The play itself is again in rhyming Alexandrines, and in the traditional five acts – a constraint which, like the sonnet, served to distil creativity into occasional works of genius. This isn’t one of them, but it’s pretty damn good. The themes are basic: love, death, shame, duty, glory. A main one is the importance of the state, which many philosophes said should be underpinned by the implied contract between individuals and their government. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, future author of Du contrat social (The Social Contract), was a leading philosophe. Even as she was
writing, De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws) by the lawyer and philosophe Baron de Montesquieu appeared, arguing that democratic republics depend on a readiness to put the community before the individual.

  Not that du Boccage’s Amazons are democrats. No one disagrees about the importance of the state. Actually, in their unanimity they seem to reflect and foreshadow something rather ominous, the militarism of Sparta, or of Nazi Germany. The play’s sub-heroine, Menalippe, explains the austere Amazon code to Theseus in what is, in effect, a feminist manifesto.

  Our unanimous aim, she says, is to redress the balance upset by the unjust seizure of power by arrogant males. The only way to do this is by force:

  From earliest childhood, we were destined for fighting,

  Our eyes – fierce, hard, devoid of tears –

  Know nothing of flattery, which is meant to charm;

  We inspire terror, not a desire to love;

  Our hands, neglecting finery to adorn us,

  Are busy with iron to forge our armour.

  And force means rejecting traditional love. Cupid’s arrows have no effect on Amazons.

  If we submit ourselves to the laws of Nature,

  It is only to control the future of our race,

  And repopulate these fields with women whose limbs

  Are free, noble, and terrible in battle.

  May they always be faithful to our virtues,

  And see our tyrants destroyed and our laws immortalised!

  It’s all for liberty, ‘the sovereign good’, and peace, achieved by virtue, and frugality. The state is the basis of society, governed by unanimous consent, without kings, who are (says Menalippe) a prey to female charms, yet who cast aside young beauties when they age. With us, she concludes, a wrinkled brow is a mark of power. It’s all well argued, very rational, in the tradition of the philosophes.

  Meanwhile, Queen Orithya has a problem. She has Theseus in her power. She’s supposed to kill him. But she’s in love with him. This is wrong twice over, because (a) it’s not rational and (b) it’s against the laws of the Amazons. It is a forbidden love, which she tries to keep hidden. After an inner struggle, she confesses to her heir and confidante, Antiope. For anyone versed in French classics, as du Boccage’s audience was, this was familiar territory. It looks back seventy years to an eminent precedent – Racine’s Phèdre, in which Phaedra, the (later) wife of Theseus, has fallen in love with her stepson, Hippolytus. Like Racine’s Phaedra, Orithya blames the goddess of love, Venus, who is using Theseus to punish her for past sins. She must keep her passion hidden, but cannot, and with its revelation the plot unfolds.

  In brief: Theseus fancies Antiope, confesses, and is rejected. Orithya agonizes: should she court the hatred of her people by saving her hero? Or kill him, and condemn herself to a living death? And all for a love that is not requited. She is appalled at her own behaviour.

  What! I offend our gods, my duty and my good name,

  I bury the memory of my glorious deeds,

  Reveal a passion that I ought to hide,

  And degrade myself in the eyes of one I cannot touch.

  An ambassador comes from the Scythians to ask for an alliance, to be secured by Antiope’s marriage to his lord and master. Orithya begs Theseus to take her away. That’s impossible. In a jealous rage, she accuses Antiope of treason. True, Antiope now loves Theseus for his fine qualities. The Greek army arrives and wins a great victory. Antiope agrees to go with Theseus to Greece. Orithya, having broken her own law, kills herself, leaving the empire to Menalippe, who will lead an Amazon nation that remains as strong as ever.

  The play was put on by the Comédie Française, the national theatre then and now, in July and August 1749. It ran for eleven performances, not a complete disaster, but certainly no hit. An English traveller who saw it commented that ‘It was a very poor performance, and barely suffered, not applauded, a French audience being too polite to affront a lady by condemning her production.’ Word of mouth was pretty damning. Rumour had it that the theatre wanted to take it off after eight performances and only du Boccage’s influence got it extended to eleven. Perhaps, muttered others, she wasn’t the real author, being a woman.

  That cheap jibe suggests there was more to the lukewarm reception than meets the eye. Du Boccage herself didn’t see it as a failure. Voltaire, noted for his scathing opinions, loved it. Fontenelle, both a friend and the official censor, praised it as a ‘play in which one sees with much pleasure Amazon warrior-esses so well represented by another illustrious Amazon.’

  One problem, perhaps, was the strength of its message. In political terms, it’s a powerful feminist demand for equality. In other circumstances, women would cheer. But, in theatrical and social terms, strength can be a weakness. Du Boccage was a fierce voice in a polite society. People, especially men, don’t generally like a hectoring tone. In plays, as in films, the message is best carried by the story and the characters, otherwise the audience loses interest.

  My guess is that an English obituary37 of du Boccage got it right – the play ‘obtained its author the applause of one half of the spectators, the jealousy of the other, and soon afterwards the honour of a translation [into Italian].’ The real problem was that she was a woman in a man’s world. Playwrights were men, right? There were no women playwrights. She was an oddity, an outlier. As a salonnière, she was acceptable. But to be accepted as a playwright? That would have taken a work of genius, not just a highly competent one-off by a society lady with intellectual ambitions.

  Undaunted, du Boccage turned to poetry, writing an epic about the discovery of America. Once again, la Condamine, her friend and New World explorer, was her inspiration. Her ambitions were all her own, as epic as the poem. La Colombiade is named after Columbus, founder of the New World, as Virgil named The Aeneid after Aeneas, Rome’s founder. Being a social as well as an intellectual powerhouse, du Boccage subtitled her epic Faith Transported to the New World and dedicated it to the Pope, Benedict XIV, in humble, indeed grovelling terms. In these 184 pages of Alexandrines, there is also an Amazon – the Indian queen, who, spurned by Columbus, gathers an army, described with classical references: ‘Penthesilea offered fewer fighters to the Trojans than there were Indians seen in the Chief’s camp.’

  As with her play, the context of the poem is more interesting than the work itself. Take the dedication to the Pope: she was no Catholic extremist, but she had good reason to ask for his blessing. Benedict was much admired by Enlightenment figures as the ‘scholars’ Pope’. He was eager to reconcile science and religion, backed the Enlightenment agenda, and – most astonishing of all – gave his support to women, most notably scientists, who are worth a diversion. One of them was Jane Squire, an Englishwoman deeply involved with the measurement of longitude, a problem eventually solved later in the century by John Harrison with his seagoing chronometer. Jane Squire’s ideas, based on astronomical observations, were highly complex and too impractical to get any of the £20,000 offered by the Board of Longitude for a solution. Hardly anyone understood her, but many admired her expertise and determination to be recognized in a male domain. Other scientists received by the Pope were Laura Bassi, the first woman to be given a professorship in science (Bologna, 1732, in anatomy, at the age – would you believe – of twenty-one), and Maria Gaetana Agnesi, mathematician, whose 1748 book laid out the principles of infinitesimal calculus. I will never have any idea what that is, but to mathematicians she is a heroine. Benedict acknowledged the genius of these women, and of du Boccage when he received her in the Vatican in 1755. All three were made members of the Bologna Academy, along with another Frenchwoman, Émilie du Châtelet, physicist and friend of Voltaire, who translated and wrote a commentary on Newton’s Principia Mathematica, the bible of the scientific revolution. It was a tribute to du Boccage’s intellect, achievements (and also possibly her networking skills) to be included in such company.

  The Colombiade has one final claim to attention: a possible link to the gay c
ommunity, a significant and long-established aspect of salon life. True to her feminist agenda, du Boccage asked a close but unnamed female friend, Madame D * * *, to illustrate the poem with engravings. Her verse of thanks suggests hidden depths. In a rough, literal translation it runs: ‘Oh thou, who, by divine gift, hast received a share of the Graces, a Muse whose wise graving-tool here paints the image of Loves. What! Friendship guides your hand, your talents embellish my work. May it have your happy destiny! It would be an advantage in giving pleasure.’ A message may lurk behind her words. ‘The image of Loves’ – why ‘Loves’, des Amours, plural? It usually means ‘love-affairs’. It is a little odd, especially as ‘loves’ have little to do with the poem’s narrative. Remember that Voltaire called du Boccage the Sappho of Normandy, and that Sappho was both poet and a Lesbian in both senses – an inhabitant of Lesbos and (supposedly) a woman with female lovers. Perhaps, in the intense social world of the salons, MadameD*** was more than a friend.

  Du Boccage went on to travel a great deal, write letters about her travels, publish them, have them translated into English, and receive praise for them from Voltaire. She lived on into old age, widely admired. Benjamin Franklin – scientist, inventor, philosopher, the most eminent American intellectual of his day – made a point of visiting her when he came to Paris in 1767. She died in 1802, aged ninety-two, a remarkable lady who still awaits a modern biographer.

  *

  By the time du Boccage died, France was a different place, changed by revolution. In German-speaking lands, still a mass of states and city-states, writers and artists were going through a revolution of their own, rather less bloody. They had been in the grip of an obsession with ideals derived from Greek and Roman art, all ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’, in a popular phrase coined by the father of neoclassicism, Johann Winckelmann. While art and architecture mostly clung to classical rules, German writers didn’t. Who wanted to see a play about normal people discussing polite subjects in measured tones, in rhyming couplets, always in five acts? Action and emotion were what mattered. The mood was set by, among others, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose Die Leiden des jungen Wertbers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) made him a literary sensation in Germany at the age of twenty-four, in all Europe a year later. Werther kills himself for unrequited love. So successful was the book that it became the first example of product placement. All over Germany, passionate young men dressed as Werther – yellow trousers, blue jacket – and bought Werther prints. So many of them (so it is said, though facts are sparse) committed copycat suicide that governments took fright; the novel was banned in Leipzig, Denmark and Italy.38 The swing away from the formality of traditional French writing became a movement known as Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress). This was youth having its day. It didn’t last long. Other authors won approval for their down-to-earth sensitivity and ‘natural’ language, notably Shakespeare, who became an honorary German thanks to the brilliant translation by the Schlegel brothers. The adoration of all things classical – Hellenism, as it was known – continued unabated. Goethe settled in little, thatched Weimar, which, with its palace and court theatre, was the village-sized capital of a mini-state, the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. There, as the greatest polymath of his day – novelist, playwright, poet, scientist, critic, theatrical director, man of letters (12,000 of which have survived) – he became the centre point of a cultural Golden Age.39