Marie-Jeanne BÉcu du Barry

1743–1793

Royal Mistress

A Shop Girl.

The last of King Louis XV's notorious mistresses, the Countess du Barry, was born into a poor family and received a convent education before becoming a worker in a Parisian dress shop. There she developed her sense of style and came to the attention of a nobleman from Gascony, the Count du Barry. She soon became his lover and began to circulate in Parisian society, serving in turn as mistress to a number of French noblemen. Eventually she came to the notice of King Louis XV and became his lover in 1768. Since the death of Madame de Pompadour in 1764, Louis had not appointed any mistress to the office of maitresse en titre, the court honor reserved for the mistress of the king. Marie-Jeanne Bécu was a commoner, and one from an unusually low social background. To secure her rise at Versailles, the Count of Barry arranged a marriage of convenience between her and his brother, and with the noble title that she thus attained, du Barry was soon appointed maitresse en titre. In this position du Barry wielded tremendous influence with the king, although she rarely dabbled in politics. Shortly after coming to court she was drawn into a court intrigue that brought down one of the king's most powerful ministers. The results proved disastrous, and du Barry confined her interests ever more to patronizing the arts. She was particularly interested in the development of the art of porcelain manufacturing in France, and encouraged the king to invest in the industry, then located at Sèvres, not far from Versailles. A generous patron of the arts, she allowed her portrait to be painted on many occasions, and commissioned artwork for her country house at Louveciennes from the greatest artists of the day. The chateau at Louveciennes was a gift from Louis XV, but du Barry set about decorating it in the reigning French fashions of the mid-eighteenth century, asking the court architect Anges-Jacques Gabriel to remodel it, and later the French designer Claude Nicholas Ledoux to build a pleasure pavilion there similar to the Petit Trianon at Versailles. Ledoux's pavilion became one of the first important monuments of the Neoclassical style in France.

Indifference to Fashion.

Madame du Barry influenced French fashions during her relatively brief reign as the king's mistress primarily through indifference. In contrast to Pompadour, du Barry was little concerned about her appearance. Her dresses were relatively simple and her hairstyles less artificial and contrived than those of other women of the court, and thus du Barry helped, perhaps unwittingly, to strengthen the tendency toward greater informality at Versailles. In the years after 1770, the king's mistress was drawn into intrigues and disagreements with the Dauphine Marie-Antoinette, the future queen of France. Although Louis XV continued to support her in her role as maitresse en titre, she was soon banished from the court at his death in 1774. For two years she was forced to live in a convent before being given her freedom. She returned to her estates at Louveciennes and lived quietly there until the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789. At the height of the Reign of Terror du Barry made several trips to London apparently to bring funds to French nobles who had fled there. Eventually she was imprisoned as a counter-revolutionary and guillotined in December of 1793. Less benevolent and popular than Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV's longest-reigning mistress, du Barry became a symbol of the corruption of Old Regime aristocratic society during the Revolution. In that society itself, though, she had long been viewed by many aristocrats as a parvenu, a lower class upstart. That she was a woman of undeniable taste, though, has long been established by the scope of her collections and patronage of the arts. Her influence on the world of fashion in France was also felt in her favoring of styles that were less contrived and more naturalistic than those common during the height of the Rococo period.

sources

André Castelot, Madame du Barry (Paris: Perrin, 1989).

Joan Haslip, Madame du Barry: The Wages of Beauty (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991).

Jacques de Saint-Victor, Madame du Barry: un nom de scandale (Paris: Perrin, 2002).

Agnes de Stoeckl, The Mistress of Versailles: Life of Madame du Barry (London: J. Murray, 1966).