Was the Marquise de Maintenon the Very First Feminist?

The short answer is: no

Isabelle Huppert as the Marquise de Maintenon with her pupils

I recently watched the incomparable Isabelle Huppert playing the Marquise de Maintenon (also known as Madame de Maintenon), second wife of Louis XIV, in the film St. Cyr. The film was a well-shot period piece, about the school for impoverished young aristocratic girls that Madame de Maintenon founded.

Isabelle Huppert's character starts of as the generous benefactress of this school and the young girls, but eventually degenerates into some kind of fascistic, wilful woman who changes her mind about the school without any consideration for the young girls she was trying to help. But the reality is quite different.

Madame de Maintenon's story is long, including an impoverished childhood, marriage to a much older man who dies leaving her without the means to support herself, and eventually employment as a nanny to Louis XIV's children, where she catches the attention of the King himself and becomes his wife through a morganatic marriage.

The purpose of St. Cyr was to provide an alternative to convents, where impoverished girls of noble backgrounds often ended up. According to the Jesuit La Chaise, the King’s confessor, St. Cyr’s aim was:

[N]ot to multiply convents, which increase rapidly enough of their own accord, but to give the State well-educated women; there are plenty of good nuns, and not a sufficient number of good mothers of families. The young ladies will be educated more suitably by persons living in the world.

Drama was one of the ways that the girls would learn poise, and Racine himself had his play Esther debuted by the young pupils. But, it was this very play, and Racine’s presence, that would change the direction of the school. The attention the girls who acted in the play received from the male courtiers was deemed inappropriate, as were several of the school's courses given to the girls. In the end, Madame de Maintenon, herself a deeply religious woman, transformed the school into a more liberalized form of a convent. And not all the girls became nuns. About two thirds of the girls who went through the school system remained "in the world."

So why was Patricia Mazuy, the director of the film, so vicious towards Madame de Maintenon, portraying her as a vacillating fascist who wanted to change St. Cyr into some form of theocracy? I think the answer lies in the later reformations that Madam de Maintenon made. She shied away from what appeared to be feminist ideas to those more concerned with the moral well being of the girls under her charge. But in fact, she was no feminist. She had merely wanted a place where girls could expand on their intellectual abilities, all within the context of their femininity, and their future roles as wives and mothers.

In her feminist rage, and feelings of betrayal, Mazuy even got Madame de Maintenon's original intention wrong. So, she portrayed her as a villainous character in the history of feminism, who abandons the movement for her religious fanaticism.

All wrong, of course.