By Dr. Bill Lipsky–
During that great era of gracious courtiers and chivalrous cavaliers known as the Age of Louis XIV (1638–1715), the behavior of the men at court who loved each other was largely ignored, unless their affair became un grand scandale. Contrary to both royal edict and canon law, the Grand Monarch, who disapproved of such goings-on, tolerated it in his inner circle. After all, to do otherwise would have meant exile or prison for some of his closest relatives.
Whether understood as le beau vice or disparaged as le vice Italien, those relatives included the king’s own father Louis XIII (1601–1643), known as “Louis the Chaste” because there is no evidence that he ever had a mistress. He much preferred the companionship of his male attendants, developing “an intense emotional attachment” first with his equerry, François de Baradas, then with Charles d’Albert, his falconer, whom “he visited at all hours of the day and night.”
Louis XIII’s last deep involvement was with Henri Coiffier de Ruzé (1620–1642), Marquis de Cinq-Mars, who unwisely plotted against the powerful Cardinal Richelieu. According to the chronicler Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux (1619–1692), on one royal journey His Majesty “sent [Cinq-Mars] to undress, who returned, adorned like a bride. ‘To bed, to bed,’ said the king impatiently.” This tidbit somehow was overlooked by Alexandre Dumas Père when he wrote The Three Musketeers about the king and his beloved male companions.
In addition to his father, Louis XIV had numerous other relatives who enjoyed same sex intimacy. They included his uncle, César de Bourbon (1594–1665), the eldest of Henri IV’s three children with his mistress Gabrielle d’Estrees, who was recognized as a Légitimé de France in 1595 and became Duc de Vendôme in 1598. César’s two grandsons, Louis-Joseph (1654–1712) and Philippe (1655–1727), also were lovers of men. Their affaires de coeur became so notorious that the family mansion in Paris was known as the Hôtel de Sodome.
According to Louis de Rouvroy (1675–1755), Duc de Saint-Simon’s Memoirs, Louis-Joseph, “one of the most remarkable soldiers” in French history, “plunged … more than anyone else” into sodomy, “satisfying his desires with his valets and officers.” The King disapproved of his “vicious habit,” but looked the other way. Louis-Joseph, “though most odiously stained with that vice—so publicly that he treated it as an ordinary gallantry—never found his favor diminished on that account.”
The most renowned of the king’s sexually contrarian relatives was his brother, Philippe, Duc d’Orléans (1640–1701). From an early age, his mother, Anne of Austria, who called him “my little girl,” encouraged him to wear women’s dresses, shoes, fanciful wigs, jewelry, and other tasteful accessories, which he did all his life. His joy in cross-dressing caused one observer to unkindly call him “the silliest woman who ever lived,” but he was constantly surrounded by handsome young men and he never had difficulty finding companionship.
Philippe was known all his life simply as “Monsieur,” the traditional term for whomever was next in line to the French throne. His first great love may have been Guy Armand de Gramont, Comte de Guiche (1637–1673), one of the great bedroom warriors of his generation. They met at the home of François Timoléon, Abbé de Choisy (1644–1724), whose mother also dressed him in women’s clothing (until he was eighteen) and who as an adult became a well-known author, diplomat, and cross-dresser.
Another of Monsieur’s early lovers was Antoine Coiffier de Ruzé, Marquis d’Effiat (1639–1719), Henri Coiffier’s nephew, who remained a member of his household until Philippe’s death. The most enduring romance of his life, however, was with Philippe, Chevalier de Lorraine (1643–1702). Known to be “as beautiful as an angel,” the two Philippes met in 1658, when both were living at the Palais-Royal in Paris. The chevalier remained Monsieur’s abiding passion and constant companion for 44 years.
Monsieur married twice. His first wife, Henrietta of England, who disliked her husband’s male lover, persuaded the king first to imprison and then to exile the chevalier to Italy in 1670. He returned two years later, after she had died, but was again ordered to absent himself from court in 1682, when he was accused of being part of a scandalous clique of sodomites who often used the gardens of the newly built Palace of Versailles for their “unnatural meetings.”
The group included Louis de Bourbon (1667–1683), the eldest surviving son of the king, and his mistress Louise de La Vallière, named a Légitimé de France and Comte de Vermandois. Louis XIV exiled him to Normandy, then ordered him to Flanders as a soldier, where he died a year later. Many of the others, including François Louis de Bourbon, Prince de La Roche-sur-Yon; the Comte de Marsan; the chevalier de Saint-Maure; and the Vidame de Laon were sent home to their family estates.
Monsieur’s second wife was Elisabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate (1652–1722), known after they wed simply as Madame. She was remarkably accepting of her husband’s sexuality and exceptionally understanding of his endless dalliances. “I do not wish any harm to the mignons,” she wrote to her aunt Sophia, Electress of Hanover, in 1697, using the contemporary and somewhat catty term for the “frivolous and fashionable young men” who surrounded him. “I chat amicably and politely with them.”
In fact, Madame was more distraught about the immense amounts that Monsieur spent on his pleasures than whom he spent the money on. “All he has in his head are his young fellows … and he gives them huge sums of money; nothing is too much or too costly for these boys,” she wrote to Sophia. Her greatest fear was that her husband’s extravagance would eventually leave her and her children penniless. It never did.
For a man more concerned with young men in his boudoir than on a battlefield, Monsieur was an effective, often fearless, and successful military commander. “I have seen him during campaigns for an entire fifteen hours on horseback,” the Abbé de Choisy remembered, where he risked “not only his life but his complexion [!] to sun and gun smoke.” Perhaps Monsieur’s greatest triumph was during the Battle of Cassel in 1677, during a war with Holland, where he defeated the forces of William of Orange.
William, the future William III of England, also was Madame’s second cousin and she was convinced the two men shared much in common.“People here think King William belongs to that brotherhood,” she wrote to Sophia in 1695. If nothing else, their confrontation on the battlefield proved that not all men who loved men were “frivolous and fashionable effeminates,” as the stereotype then portrayed them, or au poil et à la plume—“after both fur and feathers”—as some were described.
Sadly, those not of the privileged classes typically suffered much different fates when their behavior became well known. Members of the nobility and the clergy might be forced into exile, but commoners convicted of “crimes against nature” faced death. Same-sex intimacy was effectively decriminalized during the French Revolution when the Penal Code of 1791 made no mention of it. Public acceptance changed slowly—France did not recognize marriage equality until 2013—but consenting adults no longer had to fear legal prosecution.
Bill Lipsky, Ph.D., author of “Gay and Lesbian San Francisco” (2006), is a member of the Rainbow Honor Walk board of directors.
Faces from Our LGBT Past
Published on November 16, 2023
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