ABSTRACT
Jeanne de Lartigue was the Calvinist wife of the French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu. She remains almost completely missing from the archival record of her husband. Biographies of Montesquieu and classical works on the Enlightenment have replicated her absence, including her as a footnote to the story of her husband, and diminishing her to a few reductive adjectives—for example, “timid,” “virtuous,” “no beauty,” and “motherly”—that prefigured any real examination of the impact she had on Montesquieu’s corpus. This chapter explains her absence as the byproduct of three cultural knots specific to the eighteenth century. First, her perceived passivity owed much to gendered understandings of intellectual production, allowing her husband’s shadow to completely obscure Lartigue. Second, Lartigue’s devout Calvinism likely meant that actively obscuring her in the archival record provided her with a degree of safety at a time when the French state actively persecuted Calvinists. Lastly, recognizing both the role that gender and religion played in the effacement of Lartigue forces us to reconsider Lartigue’s agency over her own archival silence, which, in turn, provides a basis for reinterpreting what role she had in the formation of Montesquieu’s understandings of Calvinism and religious toleration.
