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Our edition of Moreau’s Esther is created by Anne Piéjus, a French musicologist who also writes our program note. In her note she describes the story and the background of the Racine/Moreau but leaves commentary on what became a scandal created by its public performance at Saint Cyr to our other essayists. Benjamin Bernard discusses the reception of the work in the context of the role of theatrical performance in moral education at the time at both Saint-Cyr and the Collège Mazarin for boys, schools founded as an alternative to education by the church. Philip Kennicott, drawing comparisons to the present, takes as his point of departure “the unease stirred by the 1689 performance of Racine’s Esther at Saint-Cyr and contemporary anxieties concerning the presentation of self and identity (especially among girls and young women) on social media.” He helps us understand something essential about Madame de Maintenon when he notes that “… social media allows us to live ‘at court’ in ways that de Maintenon would have recognized and deplored.”

This fascinating program is led by harpsichordist Justin Taylor, who has chosen the excerpts to be performed, and by baritone and Opera Lafayette Artistic Associate Jonathan Woody. We are delighted to have them back with us, and also to be able to introduce several new artists to our audiences this evening.

The play by Jean Racine was created for the young ladies of the royal house of Saint-Louis. (This was an educational institution, funded by the king, that accommodated 250 girls from the nobility.) The pupils were trained in theater. In 1688, Madame de Maintenon, the second wife of Louis XIV and founder of the house, commissioned a “kind of moral poem” with music, written by Racine with the assistance of composer Jean-Baptiste Moreau. Esther encompassed all the elements that contributed to the success of court spectacles at the time: tragedy, music, elaborate stage settings, sumptuous “Persian-style” taffeta costumes, and jewelry borrowed from the queen herself. Indeed, the work represented the collaborative effort of the foremost court artists of the time: including Racine, Moreau, and the designer and decorator Jean Bérain. Trained at Angers’ cathedral choir, Moreau had recently composed the court divertissement, Les Bergers de Marly. After Esther, he would go on to compose the music for Racine’s Athalie, along with several other pieces for Saint-Cyr.

It is highly likely that Racine collaborated with Moreau to facilitate the work’s alternation between declamation and song, creating expansive musical scene structures. Esther contains an overture, prelude, and extensive sung scenes at the end of each act. Music is also included within the acts, in the form of lyric interludes featuring a three-voice female choir in dialogue with detached soloists. These interventions, in which the characters of the play do not participate, suspend the dramatic action, prolonging and amplifying the effects of the text. Racine and Moreau, aiming to evoke the tradition of ancient choruses, prioritize contrasting emotions such as desolation (“Pleurons et gémissons”), supplication (“Dieu d’Israël”), confidence (“Il s’apaise il pardonne”), and joy (“Que le peuple est heureux”). During the premiere, several female singers from the courtly “Chambre du roi” mingled onstage with the student performers to form a choir of twenty-four girls. Professional female singers would take on the most demanding solo roles.The subtlety of Moreau’s style lies in the finesse of the composition, inspired by contemporary French airs: the melody is not overly virtuosic and emphasizes the sung words, while the distinctly French harmony, far from Italian effects, underscores the delicacy of these interludes composed for very young performers.

Handel likely did not know either Moreau’s music or Racine’s play, which had been adapted into English in 1715. A few years later, however, a group of poets including Alexander Pope and John Arbuthnot created a masque based on the subject, which in turn inspired the librettist and translator Samuel Humphreys, who wrote a libretto for Handel. The first version of Handel’s Esther was composed and likely premiered in 1718 at Cannons, at the residence of the Earl of Carnarvon, a patron and sponsor of the composer who provided his singers and private orchestra for the performance. The work was presumably presented on stage.

Fourteen years later, in 1732, at the height of his career, Handel had Esther performed again. In the meantime, he had composed Athalia (first performed in 1733 at Oxford), also adapted from Racine by Humphreys, who had modified the French tragedy to make it a Jacobite work, centered on the elimination of Catholicism. In 1732, a piracy incident prompted Handel to rework Esther extensively. The libretto and score underwent profound modifications, and the oratorio (HWV 50b) was performed at the King’s Theatre in Haymarket. Handel had Italian opera singers and an orchestra at his disposal, explaining the substantial size of the revised work. Esther inaugurates the form of Handel’s oratorios to come. In contrast to Racine’s play, the oratorio (a dramatic concert work performed without staging, sets, or costumes) is entirely sung and divided into successive music pieces. The chorus, representing the Israelites, remains prominent in expressing fundamental emotions such as lamentation (“Shall we of servitude complain”), prayer (as in the concerted aria “Praise the lord” and in the chorus “Save us o Lord”), or rejoicing (“The Lord our enemy has slain”). Meanwhile, the named characters present ornamented and even virtuosic arias, vocal ensembles, and recitatives to advance the plot. Due to the expressive potential of the villainous character, Handel gives a central role to the disloyal minister Haman (“Pluck root and branch”). The vivid dramatic subject allows for a musical composition based on contrast and effect musical characterization of the protagonists. In fact, however, nine of the twenty-one numbers in Esther are borrowed from an earlier work by Handel, the Brockes-Passion, created in Hamburg. This kind of musical reuse was commonplace for the composer. Handel assigns arias originally written for the pious soul or the daughter of Zion to the character of Esther, and adapts to the character of Haman arias originally composed for both Judas and Jesus. The result is a work that is powerfully expressive, despite the dramatic inconsistencies caused by these reuses (as demonstrated, for example, in Haman’s final aria on the power of forgiveness). Thus, the English oratorio derived from a French tragedy sounds in places like a German passion, beautifully illustrating the vitality of musical exchanges and influences in eighteenth-century Europe.

Written at the request of Madame de Maintenon, morganatic wife of Louis XIV, Esther was carefully tailored to reinforce the moral curriculum Maintenon hoped to teach at Saint-Cyr, the academy she founded for impoverished girls and young women born to noble families. Drama was central to her pedagogical method, but an earlier performance of Racine’s Andromache, full of unrequited desires, had touched on themes and passions too agitating for the young women. Esther, which brought a reluctant Racine out of retirement as a playwright, was designed to avoid all of that. It was, as Maintenon requested, a biblical drama, “something moral or historical” but without “any love in it.”[iv] At least, not the kind of love that would have discomfited an audience well aware that a school full of eligible but impecunious young women was an open invitation to scandal.

But Esther, successfully staged with elaborate sets and sumptuous costumes, may also have been too successful—which led to it becoming a sensation, subject to scrutiny, gossip and invidious speculations. Those details are harder to tease out and, given the interpersonal complexity and self-reflexive vigilance of court life under Louis XIV, it is not likely that any major cultural offering would have been received with sincere and unanimous approval. The criticism of Esther was manifold, from many sources, and it points to the deeper unease with theater, piety, and decorum that coursed through French society during the seventeenth century.

The Mother Superior of Saint-Cyr, Madame Durand, was apparently disturbed by the grandeur of the show, which included three changes of set and costumes, the latter designed by Maintenon herself.[v] The parish priest of Versailles, Francois Hébert, channeled longstanding anxieties about the morality of theater and fretted that Saint-Cyr would set a bad example for other educational institutions. Works like Esther, he declared, should be “banned from all education.” His concern, that schools “instead of producing novices…will produce actresses,” wasn’t just a pithy expression of preference for religious life over secular amusements. It had been less than a half century since Louis XIII formally absolved actors of the charge that their profession was inherently “infamous,” an animus borrowed from Roman law.[vi] In the interval between that declaration and the premiere of Esther, lines between religious critics of the theater and advocates for its moral utility had only hardened.

Essential to the sensation sparked by Esther and feelings that there was something scandalous about its premiere at Saint-Cyr are what today we might call its relevance. Esther, the faithful, beautiful, level-headed Queen who convinces her husband, the Persian King Ahasuerus, to save the Jews from destruction, was seen as a perhaps self-serving cipher for Maintenon herself. The play also seemed to allude to a harem of sexually available young women, the daughters of Zion whom Racine calls “Young and tender flowers, made vulnerable by their plight,” which may have been interpreted as a reference to the actresses and their classmates at Saint-Cyr.[vii] Even Maintenon’s own values, her professed aversion to vanity, display, and self-aggrandizing behavior, were easily detected in Racine’s text. When Esther’s uncle, Mardochée (Mordecai), explains the miraculous rise of the young Jewish woman to be Queen of the Persians, he discounts the role played by her charm and beauty: “Be well assured, he made not choice of you/to be a vain and useless shew to Asia, Nor merely to enchant the eyes of men...”[viii] Maintenon’s rivals, critics and enemies would likely have heard flattery to the wife of the French king in those lines.

Changes at Saint-Cyr suggest that the anxieties provoked by Esther weren’t a matter of its content or the intent behind its production. Rather, the success of the play had focused attention in the wrong places and unsettled the longstanding tension articulated by Molière between theater’s ability to “correct men’s errors” while simultaneously amusing them.[ix] Racine produced yet another play for Saint-Cyr, the 1691 Athalie, which was performed without costumes and without the elaborate stage settings designed for Esther. It was also performed privately, for the girl’ edification rather than the court’s amusement. Theater remained integral to education at Saint-Cyr but focused on Maintenon’s more rigorously moralizing classroom dramas and dramatic proverbs—short scenes, like Socratic dialogues, in which the girls enacted conversations about life, morals and proper behavior.[x]

The immediate response to Esther in French society seems to be a moment of retrenchment, rather than retreat from the idea that theater was a useful moral tool, or at the least, a harmless diversion. The eighteenth century’s most cogent and inventive critic of theater, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, essentially abandoned religious arguments about the morality of writing, producing, and witnessing theatrical entertainments. Rather, he doubted theater’s constructive or instructive power, including catharsis, while acknowledging that it was in many contexts essentially harmless. “I know that the poetic theater claims to…purge the passions in exciting them. But I have difficulty understanding this rule. Is it possible that in order to become temperate and prudent we must begin by being intemperate and mad?”[xi] Theater reenforced preexisting moral conditions, and some communities, such as the city of Geneva, his birthplace and idealized homeland, existed in a prelapsarian innocence of any need for theater as diversion or distraction.

In Emile, Rousseau allows theater into his curriculum, but only as a guide to taste, not morality.[xii] Yet the pedagogical method advocated by Rousseau in Emile is essentially theatrical. Lessons are carefully prepared, staged in particular settings, held back until the student is in a state of perfect susceptibility. They are staged, so as to “engrave” their lessons all the more indelibly on the heart. “I shall begin by moving his imagination. I shall choose the time, the place, and the objects most favorable to the impression I want to make. I shall, so to speak, call all of nature as a witness to our conversations.”[xiii] Borrowing from both seventeenth-century advocates and critics of the theater, Rousseau confirms the power of theater to bypass mere reason and create indelible impressions. Contemporary advocates for Christian theater essentially echo Rousseau’s pedagogical use of theatrical methods (“Never reason in a dry manner with youth,” he writes in Emile), and his skepticism of dry sermons or “long speeches.”[xiv]

In the decades, and centuries, after the premiere of Esther, the powerful anti-theatrical sentiments it exacerbated don’t disappear, but become a quiet, chronic background anxiety about the medium, mostly inert but with the potential for occasional flare ups. Anti-theatrical tracts published in the United States in the nineteenth century carry forward diluted, vestigial echoes of those anxieties even as theater became a pervasive pastime. The American Tract Society, active in the first half of the nineteenth century, echoed anti-theatrical arguments that would have been familiar to readers of strident anti-theatrical writers Pierre Nicole and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet two centuries earlier: That theater distracts us from prayer and spiritual endeavor and encourages vice; that attendance is complicity in the degradation of the actors, and the pleasures and sensations elicited by the theater cause disorder in the soul.[xv]

Yet even the author of that tract acknowledged that the arguments might sound “puritanical” to his or her readers. By the twentieth century, the complex theological and psychological arguments mobilized against works like Esther essentially disappeared. Today, theatrical scandals, especially those concerning theater produced by and for young people, are centered mainly on content. And the psychological mechanism whereby content causes moral damage is relatively simple-minded compared to seventeenth century arguments about how the mind and body respond to theatrical sensations. Today, theatrical skeptics argue that mere exposure to dangerous material will tempt young people to behave in inappropriate ways. And the material considered dangerous is primarily sexual, motivating reactions and efforts to censor works including Rent, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, The Laramie Project and Indecent.[xvi]

Off the table and no longer relevant to contemporary discourse is the vast range of other subjects, dangers, and anxieties that stirred seventeenth-century French critics of the medium. There is no broadly accepted idea that theater must be didactic and moral. Outside of undergraduate philosophy seminars, no one spends much time worrying about the inherent dangers of imitation or semblance. There is no particular worry that theater might make young people vulnerable to human foibles such as hypocrisy, vanity and arrogance. The idea that emotions that are too intensely felt might be dangerous is limited mainly to the discourse of mental health.

Nor do advocates of the theater offer a defense approaching the nuance and sophistication of seventeenth-century defenders. Laughter is a sign that comedy has succeeded, but there is little discussion of the inherent moral value of ridicule, as in the anonymous seventeenth-century Lettre sur la comédie de l’Imposteur.[xvii] Catharsis, which Rousseau questioned, is blandly accepted as the principal reason we continue to attend tragedy. Broad defenses of theater emerge when public funding for non-profit theatrical companies is questioned, but they are rarely more substantial than a vague argument that has value beyond mere entertainment because it helps us exercise the muscles of empathy. Theater isn’t an arena for moral speculation, but a kind of Peloton class for kindness and social cohesion.

A more compelling analogy to the heated seventeenth-century arguments about theater in France can be found in contemporary anxieties about social media, its erosion of lines between the public and private selves, its exposure of the body to desire, and its enticements to vanity and display. This analogy also offers useful, retrospective insight into some of the more opaque details of the sensation caused by Esther. Maintenon’s reaction to criticism of Esther was not to eliminate drama at Saint-Cyr, but to privatize it. In 1701, she wrote, “You must limit performances to the classroom and never let them be seen by outsider spectators, under any circumstance.”[xviii] There was concern not just with the exposure of the girls’ bodies to the male gaze, but to how the spectacle of Esther changed the behavior of the girls, who were felt to be more vain and less tractable after their theatrical triumph.

The seventeenth-century reading of this, which reenforces Maintenon’s own values, is that Esther incited vanity in the young women, encouraging behaviors and traits she associated with the hollow ambitions of court life. We might, today, suggest that the girls’ successful performance of a play that enacts female heroism gave them a rare sense of agency in their own lives. This, too, would have aroused deeper seventeenth-century concerns about the role of theater in corrupting actors at the most basic, existential level, the anti-theatrical conviction that by impersonating or inhabiting another person’s identity, we lose our own sense of self. We become fixated on things outside of and irrelevant to the more important, inner sense of spiritual wellbeing. Nicole fretted that actors, especially, would be “entirely occupied with external objects, and entirely intoxicated by the madness that we see represented there.”[xix] Women, especially, were deformed merely by acting with confidence before an audience. To go onstage, wrote Pierre Coustel, a woman must “fortify [herself] against the restraint, so decorous and so natural to [her] sex, in order to be able to speak with confidence.”[xx]

Contemporary anxiety about social media, both religious and secular criticism, reproduces many of the same fears. We inhabit identities that are not our own; we fixate on extraneous things; we fashion public selves from values and desires extraneous to our authentic sense of self. Just as seventeenth-century critics of drama argued that to impersonate sinful behavior, an actor had to recall and reexperience earlier instances of actual sin, today, we fear the power of social media to retraumatize young people as it keeps them in proximity to a perpetual memory of earlier injuries or traumas.[xxi] Religious arguments about social media replicate the familiar seventeenth-century fear about time and salvation: “If you are spending all your time on social media, you are, at best, wasting time you could be using to serve God,” writes the author of a Christian blog post, “Should Christians use Social Media? Does Social Media Lead to Sin?”[xxii] They also replicate seventeenth-century arguments about the dangers of court life, including the temptation to gossip and coquetry.

Social media has quantified what would have been, in seventeenth-century court life, more arcane and indeterminate ways of measuring social status and influence. But that has only reinforced its power to replicate many of the social dynamics from which Maintenon sought to defend her charges, the students at Saint-Cyr. We wear masks, place ourselves on display, seek validation from the desire of others, pander to their desires, and sacrifice the peace of solitude for pursuits that bring no meaning to our lives. The psychological cost of all of this is presaged in the words of one of Maintenon’s own interlocutors, Madame Duceaux, from the spiritual proverbs: “One needs always to dissimulate, to appear sad if the king is, even when one is not; to express joy if it’s expected, although one is full of sorrow…to speak contrary to one’s opinion, to conform to theirs, to indulge all of their passions; to sacrifice sleep, health and often one’s conscience.”[xxiii]

It’s difficult, reading Esther in the twenty-first century, to understand how it could have been a subject of controversy. The mistake, of course, is to look at its themes, characters or content. The danger wasn’t the subject or the treatment, but rather the invitation it offered the Saint-Cyriennes to develop one of the fundamental tools of social life, the ability to fashion their own identities. Seventeenth-century arguments against theater were religiously motivated, but those arguments intersected closely with what may have been even deeper fears about public life, truth, selfhood, authenticity and identity. What was at stake was reality itself—our ability to distinguish the real from the feigned—a fear that feels strikingly contemporary today. A seventeenth-century visitor to twenty-first-century society might be bewildered: How did a democratic, pluralistic society create technology that so effectively encourages hierarchy, status and the alienation of life lived perpetually at court?

[i] Theresa Varney Kennedy. “From Stage to Cloister: Madame de Maintenon’s Classroom Drama,” Yale French Studies 130 (2016). 114.

[ii] Cited in Veronica Buckley. The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d’Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) 309.

[iii] Kennedy, “From Stage to Cloister,” 113-114.

[iv] Buckley, 308.

[v] Timothy Pyles. “Bodies of Theology: Racine’s Esther and Athalie as Embodied Theology,” Theater Symposium 27 (2019). 26.

[vi] Henry Philips. The Theater and its Critics in 17th Century France (Oxford University Press, 1980) 4

[vii] Kennedy, “From Stage to Cloister,” 114-115.

[viii] Racine. Esther, Act II Scene 1. From 1803 English translation, Edinburgh.

[ix] Moliere. First Petition Addressed to the King Concerning Tartuffe, cited in Moliere, The Misanthrope and Other Plays (Penguin, 1959) 104.

[x] Kennedy, “From Stage to Cloister,” 116.

[xi] Jean-Jaques Rousseau. Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre, translated Allan Bloom (Cornell University Press, 1960) 20.

[xii] Jean-Jaques Rousseau. Emile, translated by Allan Bloom (Basic Books, 1979) 344.

[xiii] Ibid., 323.

[xiv] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile. 323. For insight into contemporary Christian theatrical pedagogy, see Sunrise Magazine, online “The Importance of Christian Drama as Ministry,” June 7, 2016. https://www.sunrisemagazine.org/blog/post.php?s=2016-06-07-the-importance-of-christian-drama-as-a-ministry

[xv] Tracts of the American Tract Society, Theatrical Exhibitions. Volume IV, No. 130.

[xvi] Natansan, Hannah. The Culture War’s Latest Casualty: The High School Musical. The Washington Post, May 2, 2023.

[xvii] Julie Prest. “Failed Seductions and the Female Spectator: Pleasure and Polemic in the Lettre sur la comédie de l'Imposteur.” Yale French Studies 130 (2016) 16.

[xviii] Kennedy, “From Stage to Cloister,” 116.

[xix] From the Traité de la comédie, cited in Philips, The Theater and its Critics in 17^th Century France. 117.

[xx] Cited in Philips, The Theater and its Critics in 17^th Century France. 186.

[xxi] There is a wide discourse on the power of social media to shape identity, confuse our sense of values and traumatize and retraumatize susceptible individuals. For 17^th century arguments about sin and memory, see Philips, 186. For contemporary concerns, see for example Paula Durlofsky, Logged on and Stressed Out and Nausicaa Renner, “How Social Media Shapes our Identity,” The New Yorker, August 8, 2019.

[xxii] Should Christians use Social Media? Does Social Media Lead to Sin,” from www.412teens.org https://412teens.org/qna/should-Christians-use-social-media.php

[xxiii] Kennedy, “From Stage to Cloister.” 118.

Fig. 1: The former Maison Royale de Saint-Louis at Saint-Cyr, damaged by Allied bombs during World War II, was restored as a military school. Photo by author, January 2024.

Yet Maintenon was not the only high-ranking representative of the monarchy to consecrate an elite school in the 1680s to serve Bourbon interests.[1] Another was the Cardinal Mazarin (1602–1661), the head minister of Louis XIV, who founded the Collège Mazarin. Louis XIV, along with these two counselors, Mazarin and Maintenon, used education policy to solve two interrelated problems: to integrate newly acquired provinces into the French state both administratively and culturally, and to bolster the impoverished nobility who paid dearly for his military conquests.[2]

By comparing Saint-Cyr with this contemporaneous institution, the Collège Mazarin, we can better understand the aims of the monarchy, as well as the intellectual, social, and political context of elite education out of which so much baroque theater, including Moreau’s Esther, emerged. The political goals of these two schools, along with Maintenon’s image as an educational theorist and practitioner, shed light on the performing arts produced within this pedagogical milieu. To that end, this essay makes two main points: First, Saint-Cyr can be considered as part of a broader trend of the absolutist state attempting to supplant the church as the sponsor of elite education. Second, school theater served as one aspect of moral instruction, a goal around which school curricula and institutional procedures were organized during the pre-Enlightenment.

My first clue that these schools were of comparable status and formed a common educational project was the observation that some families began to send their sons to the Collège Mazarin and their daughters to Saint-Cyr. A fascinating example here is a branch of the Aumale family: the improbably named Scholastique-Florence d’Aumale enrolled in Madame de Maintenon’s school in 1732, while her brother Charles-François d’Aumale was sent to the Collège Mazarin in 1734.

Now, the Aumale clan’s old noble title conferred status on the family, but they experienced a precarious financial position relative to other chatelains. Louis XIV’s own foreign policy may have played a role in draining the family coffers, for nobles across France had depleted their fortunes to fund military regiments for Louis XIV’s territorial expansion. The Collège Mazarin and the Maison Royale therefore educated the children of poor nobles of high birth whose fathers either no longer had the resources to hire private tutors or had been killed in action.

The intentions of Mazarin and Maintenon, however, seem to have been more than philanthropic: by extending royal largesse to young nobles, they effectively bought the loyalty of an entire social class who would constitute a future base of political support. The French aristocracy was not a genealogical fact of nature, but instead a class whose identity was shaped through social policy. Consider again the family of young Scholastique-Florence and Charles-François: specifically, their aunt, named Marie-Jeanne d’Aumale. Marie-Jeanne had joined Saint-Cyr as a demoiselle in 1690 and, after receiving a comprehensive education, she soon became the private secretary to Madame de Maintenon herself.[1] Marie-Jeanne accompanied Maintenon through life—her journal has become an important source for historians studying the school—as well as through death, for it was she who announced to Maintenon the expiration of the latter’s secret husband Louis XIV on the morning of September 1, 1715.[2]

Mazarin had more explicit aims of cultural diplomacy in founding his school. Through those wars of conquest that had cost the nobility so dearly, the so-called Sun King had expanded the Bourbon kingdom and consolidated French control over new territories. The Cardinal Mazarin had helped broker advantageous peace agreements including the Treaty of Münster (1648) and the conference of Pheasant Island (1659), which settled peace with Habsburg Spain in part through the young king’s first marriage, to his Spanish princess cousin. To solidify this successful legacy, Mazarin made provisions in his will to found a school serving elite boys—preferably aristocrats, but bourgeois if space allowed.

Fig. 2: Pierre Mignard, Portrait of cardinal Jules Mazarin. 1658–1660. Musée Condé. Wikimedia Commons.

This school, the Collège Mazarin, soon became known as the Collège des Quatre-Nations, for its student body was drawn from four territorial acquisitions: former Italian and Savoyard lands, parts of Alsace and Franche-Comté (conquered after Mazarin’s death), Flanders (Artois, Luxembourg), and Roussillon (Sardinian lands). While Louis XIV’s military architect Sébastien Le Prestre, Marquis of Vauban, secured these new frontier provinces through an “iron wall” of fortresses spaced along the border, the monarchy also turned to the cultural integration of these provinces through elite education.

The Collège Mazarin opened two years after Saint-Cyr, in 1688, with the aim of subordinating local elites and transforming them into loyal servants of the French state. The school offered full scholarships to sixty boys from the nobility of those four regions. With its palatial building designed by architect Louis Le Vau, its cutting-edge Cartesian philosophy curriculum, and its relatively high professorial salaries, it became almost immediately the most desirable collège, or elite classical high school, affiliated with the University of Paris.[3] (The complex still stands: situated directly across the Pont des Arts from the Louvre, it currently houses the Bibliothèque Mazarine as well as the five academies, including the Académie Française, of the Institut de France.)

Fig. 3: Meyer / Nicolas Perelle. View of the Collège des Quatre-Nations[Collège Mazarin], 1726. Source: Rijksmuseum / Creative Commons.

Fig. 4: The Institut de France in Paris—formerly the Collège Mazarin. Photo by author, February 2017.

Cardinal Mazarin had hoped, as the school’s founding charter enumerated, that “…all these Provinces would become French by their own Inclination as much as they currently are by His Majesty’s domination.”[1] They could do so by providing opportunities for acquiring wealth and status through service to the monarchy. Over time, the school became quite successful at integrating students into state administration, thereby consolidating the modern borders of metropolitan France. One boy from Besançon in Franche-Comté, Claude-Antoine Bocquet de Courbouzon (1682–1762), attended the late Cardinal’s school in Paris and subsequently became a French magistrate..

Fig. 5: Nicolas Perelle. The conquest of Franche-Comté [depicting the king laying siege to Besançon]. Engraving, 1675. Source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Mazarin wanted more for these youth than successful careers in the French administration. The monarchy also had to teach provincial elites to adopt French “mœurs et coutumes,” which we might translate as “customs and mores,” “moral behavior,” or even simply “culture.” Students at the school learned virtuous manners by studying models worthy of emulation from Latin classics and Christian morality, as well as by attending chapel as a class. One regent (professor) at the school, Nicolas Theru, explained in the preface to the textbook he wrote and used, “In having this little Work printed, we had no other design but to instruct young people in their duties, to train them in piety, and to distance them from evil;” scripture would “inspire in young people wisdom, piety, the fear of God, the love of virtue, and the fright of vice” and make “an excellent protective against the corruption of the world…”[5]

Schoolmasters tried to maintain airtight control over the urban popular and elite literary cultures—including theater, literature, and music—to which students were exposed.

Attempting to keep students on a virtuous path meant disciplining the ones who strayed, too. Teachers at Mazarin drew up lists of “diligent” and “lazy” students and submitted them to the school’s grandmaster. The highest-achieving students might be exempt from submitting their course notes for approval that week, and the top rhetoric student would be awarded a book prize. But a young man drawn into vice—especially a gambling, drinking, or prostitution recidivist—could face expulsion, banishment from Paris, and relegation to his home province. The moral discipline of students extended far beyond the classroom, as schoolmasters sought to delimit students’ experiences of pleasure. Faculty worked closely with the police lieutenant general’s “bureau des mœurs,” or vice squad, to clear out the vendors hawking alcoholic limonade and sweets away from the school gates and to enforce a ban on neighborhood cafés from selling liquor to students. Their notion of “mores” included other aspects of sensual pleasure as well: what we understand today as gender and sexual diversity. With increasing might through the late 1710s and 1720s, faculty and police worked in concert to close brothels in the neighborhood of the school and to prevent prostitutes from soliciting the young men’s pocket money. And this powerful administrative team tracked and denounced so-called “sodomites” to prevent students from being “corrupted” into a “taste for” sexual relations with men.[1] While detailed school disciplinary records were destroyed in the French Revolution, extant sources indicate that faculty confiscated forbidden books that contained irreligious, pornographic, or immature themes. (One group of boys even made a book, unfortunately no longer extant, of adolescent rhymes set to the tunes of their chapel psalms.) By restricting students’ access to media, especially print, teachers hoped to prevent the morals of immaculate youths from decaying into those of libertine adults. The results of this moral education at the Collège Mazarin were, as might be expected, mixed: in the cosmopolitan capital, with its increasingly vibrant print culture spreading heterodox ideas and with the many pleasures of urban civil society, teachers could not keep students locked inside the school gates forever—nor could they keep the Enlightenment out.[2]

Analogous dynamics played out at the Maison Royale de Saint-Louis in the town of Saint-Cyr. Unlike Cardinal Mazarin, Madame de Maintenon was able to administer her school closely and effectively due in part to the advantage of, well, not being deceased. By many accounts, she took an active role in designing curricula, in visiting classes, and in mentoring the demoiselles and instructors alike. She also wrote on educational philosophy and developed lessons in the form of “dialogues, conversations, lectures, proverbs, maxims, and commentaries.”[3]

Fig. 6: Nicolas de Fer. Maison et jardins de St Cir près Versailles. 1705. Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

The purpose of Saint-Cyr, according to the printed school constitution handbook called the Règle or Rule, was to prepare girls of the impoverished nobility “for the two principle estates of [their] gender”: either to remain “excellent virgins for the cloisters,” or to become “pious mothers out in the world.”[1] Few male educational theorists in the early modern period discussed the importance of women’s education.[2] One exception was Archbishop Fénelon, who acted as spiritual mentor to Maintenon until their falling-out over a religious dispute and who may have been inspired by the writings of her grandfather. Fénelon emphasized that a woman’s education should help her with “the education of her children…, of the behavior—moral and otherwise—of servants, of the household economy…” And so noblewomen such as those at the Maison Royale needed to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. According to Fénelon, noblewomen generally needed neither the military arts, nor Latin and rhetoric, nor philosophy and theology.[3] The demoiselles of Saint-Cyr, however, did study theology, astronomy, Latin—and arts including music and dance.[4] After the deaths of their husbands, many women would adopt management of their family estates and businesses in their own names, and they played a recognized role in transmitting virtuous culture to their children.

The demoiselles would accomplish this latter goal through pious exercises, catechism and religious instruction—and labor, so they might be accustomed to work. The institution’s proscriptive Règle or Rule imposed austerity in architecture just as in morals. Of the school interiors, the Rule forbade alterations to a style of renunciation, stripped bare: “Do not suffer the least ornament,” it wrote; “let all exude poverty and simplicity.”[5] Maintenon exhibited similar austerity in the Attic rhetorical style in which she had the demoiselles taught, a simple approach with no extraneous words.[6] By practicing silence and modesty, and by distancing themselves from the temptations of court, girls could cultivate a spiritual form of ego-death, or “la mort à soy-même.”[7] For, as the Rule warns: “You are at the gates of Versailles, exposed to the most violent temptations.”[8] Whereas the Collège Mazarin regents and governors demonstrated near-constant worry about the possibility that young boys would become corrupted into urban vices, Maintenon and her teachers fretted about the exposure of girls to the habits of the nearby royal court at Versailles.

Maintenon was one to know, for she traveled frequently between the court and her school where, in the estimation of historian Mark Bryant, she spent two to three days per week. The three-mile journey from the royal stables to the school could have been made in well under an hour by coach, and there were numerous connections between the school and Versailles from the very start. Jean Racine and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, both literary giants and royal historiographers, edited the school Constitutions for typographical errors.[9] Maintenon’s protégé Michel Chamillart, the school’s chief finance officer, became the comptroller of finances for the kingdom in 1699. And the king himself would pray in the school chapel on Sundays, if he visited.[10] Balancing the advantages of proximity to court with the dangers it posed, the school brought together the monarchy’s foreign policy with court society. However, the goals of state educational policy and the all-too-human drives of courtiers sometimes came into conflict. Indeed, these collided spectacularly during performances of Esther.

To understand why, consider the purpose of school theater. Moral education could be accomplished with both the carrot and the stick, and theater was the carrot. At the end of the year, students in early modern elite schools enjoyed taking a break from their typical studies to perform in a play during the end-of-year festivities for the distribution of prizes to top students.[1] Often, rhetoric faculty at collèges would write their own plays, in the belief that theater could both “please and instruct.”[2] As the musicologist Anne Piéjus describes:

“…[T]he entire collège theater… aims at a certain form of pleasure... Pleasure with a thousand facets for the students, between the satisfaction of surpassing oneself, scholarly emulation, the joy of fully immersing oneself - often under the best conditions - dramatic play, singing, or dancing. This delectare [delighting] proceeds from an education of emulation, rooted in the self, in a direct connection with court society.”[3]

In this account, pleasure, rather than an end unto itself, served as a vehicle for learning virtue. As père Jouvancy put it in his essential treatise on education, the Ratio discendi: “Tragedy must serve to shape mores….”[4] Some characters seem to have been intended as models worthy of virtuous emulation; Esther is a prime example. Badly behaved characters, even at their worst, are useful to think with and against, such as Corneille’s wicked Cleopatra.[5] In either case, theater could make a powerful statement—one that operated, I think, on two phenomenological levels at once. First, by performing the plays, students may have felt out what it might be like to embody the virtues and vices of their characters and learn through emulation; second, the noble parents, classmates, and communities of the student-performers could attend the shows, thereby learning moral lessons from their seats in the audience.

Theater was thus a mass medium, and it merited tight control. Maintenon was not just the patron of the two Saint-Cyr tragedies; in 1697, she also famously expelled a troupe of Italian actors from Paris after being caricatured in one of their shows, La Fausse Prude.[6] The Rule instructed the community at Saint-Cyr: “Avoid curiosity; read only what is given to you by your superiors.” And the school constitutions mandated: “Do nothing to attract people through festivals and spectacles ; you are not constituted to sing like canons, nor to do a grand mass that attracts the public…”[8] This austerity hardly sounds like the attitude of a gregarious courtier; these are instead the stipulations of a leader backtracking after scandal.

The shame of Esther’s premiere illustrates, scholars have noted, the inescapable anxieties about gender and sexuality that school theater provoked. At boys’ collèges, performing school theater posed challenges to the norms of propriety. According to the Jesuit tradition, women should not appear as actresses onstage; to include female characters, then, entailed putting boys in women’s dress—not a palatable proposition for every rhetoric

instructor. Some schools therefore attempted to write plays without any women at all—which inevitably ended up boring their audiences. Additionally, it was deemed unfitting for schools to depict characters whose tragic suffering was due to love.[1] Under such restrictions, what subjects remained appropriate to perform?

There were a few common themes. School theater could treat the dilemmas facing men in war, as well as the homosocial friendships between men. One of the most popular theatrical settings was the Biblical story of David, Jonathan, and Saul: four of the first five years of school theater (as well as a revival of the topic in 1741 and 1745) at the Collège Mazarin treated this subject from various angles, and Jonathas by Joseph-François Duché de Vancy was performed at Saint-Cyr in 1699. Not until 1740 did the Collège Mazarin perform a comedy. David and Jonathan had long been considered as paradigmatic examples of Aristotelian “perfect friendship.”[2] This category of male affection tapped into compositional elements of courtly opera without contravening rules of propriety.[3] Musicologists have suggested that successive settings of the story of David and Jonathan from the 1680s to the 1720s presented increasingly chaste depictions of intense male friendships. (According to this interpretation, Handel’s adaptation Saul was most repressed of all in the broader social context of the raids on queer English molly-houses that coincided with the policing of sodomites around the collèges of Paris’s Latin Quarter.)[4] The specters of gender deviance and male intimacy haunted these productions.

Saint-Cyr experienced problems of a different nature. In order to practice the musical and theatrical arts that might one day please their future husbands, the demoiselles should have found performing in public useful. But putting unmarried girls on display for an audience of leering male courtiers provoked a scandal—out of public embarrassment, certainly. But the incident also represented a pedagogical failure, for the school had failed to protect the integrity of the demoiselles’s virtuous femininity.

The incident around the premiere of Esther suggests how deeply Maintenon was caught between the competing ideals and mechanics of the school and the court. As a school ultimately aimed at shoring up state power, Saint-Cyr in theory should have exercised tighter control over media, just as the monarchy sought to censor the production of print. It should have liberated young minds through carefully controlling their exposure to free-thinking ideas and keeping the worldly pleasures of court libertines at a remove. Yet the genre of school theater could not break through the paradoxes inherent to its institutional context. As Piéjus continues:

“The supposed pleasure of performing and of being seen, regularly denounced [by austere religious opponents of school theater]… prompted the greatest caution from schoolmasters aware of possible excesses… all else being equal, cultivating the taste for appearance in an aesthetically regulated framework, as in a tragedy with danced interludes, is nevertheless merely a transposition to the youthful world of courtly spectacles where the princes of blood were seen dancing.”[5]

The premiere of Esther fell victim to a contradiction: at a school founded on a monastic model yet close to Versailles, school theater could not easily serve both the school’s pedagogical aims alongside the political aims and social desires of courtiers at the same time.

Maintenon became more conservative in her attitudes to theater in the wake of this show. Nevertheless, she seems to represent the end of a devout generation rather than the start of a new era of moral control. What Handel biographer Victor Schoelcher wrote in relation to the London stage may apply equally to the French court: “But in proportion as religion lost its empire, it adopted severer laws in order to maintain an imposing exterior…”[1] The zeal of school productions belied how easily students might later attend—or even write and perform in—heterodox theater in the city.

This, then, was the great contradiction of collège drama: it taught students not only to appreciate, but also to participate.[2] The generation born in the 1720s and attending such schools as these would break free from the moral strictures of the established absolutist patronage system as the Old Regime of moral tragedy began to falter in the face of urban theater. Writers observed this shift and celebrated it. One young playwright of the next generation, Claude-Pierre Patu, wrote to a friend in 1751:

“Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, Moliere…? Oh fie, then: these latter are still good for small works. In a secondary position, fine; but to attract a crowd, …long live our lovely moderns.”[3]

It was this world of the schools of Maintenon and Mazarin—the moral vision for their students, the social policies of the absolutist monarchy, the attempts at controlling media—against which Enlightenment writers, and their crowds of followers, would soon rebel.

Fig. 7: The author at the gates of Saint-Cyr, January 2024.

[1] I thank Berin Szoka and Will Schoderbek for their hospitality in Paris, which made the research for this essay possible.

[2] On Maintenon as a political figure, see: Da Vinha and Grande, Toute la cour était étonnée, 12.

[3] On Saint-Cyr in particular, see: Milhet, Lieutenant-colonel, “Saint-Cyr, Haut lieu voué à l’éducation,” 99.

[4] Bryant, Queen of Versailles, 8.

[5] D’Aumale, “Marie Jeanne D’aumale”; Aumale, Les Cahiers; Bourrilly, “Souvenirs sur Madame de Maintenon.”

[6] Brockliss, “The Moment of No Return: The University of Paris and the Death of Aristotelianism”; Compère, Les collèges français; Compère, Du collège au lycée (1500-1850).

[7] “Contrat du fondation son Monseigneur le Cardinal Mazarin du College et Academie des Quatre Nations soubs le titre de Mazarini du 6 Mars 1661,” Collège Mazarin registre des délibérations, Archives Nationales MM 462 ff1-8. Translation my own; cited in Bernard (2022), 128.

[8] Ferrer, “Claude-Antoine Bocquet de Courbouzon (1682–1762): ‘Un Aigle Qui s’Approchait de La Sphère Du Soleil.’” Courbouzon’s townhouse today houses liberal arts departments of the Université de Franche-Comté.

[9] Picco, “Origines géographiques des Demoiselles de Saint-Cyr,” 119.

[10] Faucompret, Les pensionnaires du Collège Mazarin ou des quatre nations, 1688–1794, 235; Unknown, “Répertoire Chronologique d’admissions.”

[11] “Preface,” Theru, Instruction des jeunes gens.

[12] See chapter 2 of Bernard, “Administering Morals.”

[13] On the relationship between collège faculty and the Enlightenment, see: Noguès, Une archéologie du corps enseignant; on the school experiences of future Enlightenment philosophers, see: Ben Messaoud, “Un professeur de D’Alembert”; Ben Messaoud, “Les ‘Observations’ de Crevier Sur ‘L’Esprit Des Lois.’”

[14] Bryant, Queen of Versailles, 74; Maintenon, Comment la sagesse vient aux filles.

[15] Maintenon, Brinon, and Maison royale de Saint-Louis, Regle et constitutions de Saint-Cyr. Translation my own.

[16] Grell and Ramière de Fortanier, L’éducation des jeunes filles nobles en Europe, 7.

[17] Fénelon, Traité de l’éducation des filles, ch. 11 “Instruction des femmes sur leurs devoirs,” cited in Grell and Ramière de Fortanier, 23. Translation my own.

[18] Bryant, Queen of Versailles, 74.

[19] Maintenon, Brinon, and Maison royale de Saint-Louis, Regle et constitutions de Saint-Cyr, 28.

[20] Boiron, “Mme de Maintenon, Professeure de Stylistique.”

[21] Maintenon, Brinon, and Maison royale de Saint-Louis, Regle et constitutions de Saint-Cyr, 44. (This theme is often repeated, and fits Maintenon’s austerity: due to the inconveniences of marriage, Maintenon advised her students elsewhere that young women must “forget their selves”: Maintenon, Comment la sagesse vient aux filles, 45.

[22] Maintenon, Brinon, and Maison royale de Saint-Louis, Regle et constitutions de Saint-Cyr, 44.

[23] Piéjus, “Racine, Mme de Maintenon et Saint-Cyr,” 48.

[24] Bryant, Queen of Versailles, 21; 73–74.

[25] Faucompret, Les pensionnaires du Collège Mazarin ou des quatre nations, 1688–1794.

[26] Piéjus, Plaire et instruire.

[27] Piéjus, Plaire et instruire, 18; see also: Piéjus, Le théâtre des demoiselles.

[28] Jouvancy Ratio discendi, cited in: Prest, Theatre under Louis XIV, 45.

[29] Prest, Theatre under Louis XIV, chapter 2.

[30] Grande, “Fausse prude ou vraie ingénue: Mme de maintenon et la scène.,” 205.

[31] Maintenon, Brinon, and Maison royale de Saint-Louis, Regle et constitutions de Saint-Cyr, 48. Translation my own.

[32] Maintenon, Brinon, and Maison royale de Saint-Louis, 29.

[33] This paragraph is drawn from: Prest, Theatre under Louis XIV.

[34] For example, a Jesuit philosophy teacher at the Collège of Reims interpreted this tradition for his students and readers: Cerisiers, Ionathas, ou Le vray amy.

[35] Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure, 126; Henderlight, “Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s David et Jonathas,” 187.

[36] Henderlight, “Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s David et Jonathas”; Psychoyou and Raphaëlle Legrand, “De la sublimation en musique.”

[37] Piéjus, Plaire et instruire, 18. Translations my own.

[38] Schœlcher, The Life of Handel, 109.

[39] On popular participation in Enligthenment culture, see: Bell, “For a New Social History of the Enlightenment.”

[40] Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France MS 1277 f°227, November 10, 1751.

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