History as voyeurism: from Marguerite de Valois to La 'Reine Margot'

Queen Marguerite de Valois of France (1533-1615) is among the most vilified characters in French history. Accused of incest, corruption, insatiable se xual desire, murders, treason, and direct responsibility for the political disintegration of France in the Sixteenth Century, her image has never stop ped intriguing historians. The historical Marguerite, however, is overshado wed by the popular heroine of Alexandre Dumas' novel Queen Margot(1845). Th e article traces the influence of the novel on historical scholarly biograp hies of the queen, arguing that professional historians have not been able to disentangle themselves from the literary product. Neither have they been capable of overcoming the role of sexual desire in their shaping of the qu een. The Marguerite historians have portrayed has been shaped by the sexual fantasies and the sexual politics of the nineteenth-century author, and by the historians' own voyeuristic gaze. In a time of professional anxiety an d debate about the uniqueness of historical analysis and writing as compare d to literary and artistic productions, the article questions the possibili ty of distinguishing between these enterprises.