Category: French History
This episode features our frequent and very popular guest Elyse Rivin. If you enjoy her episodes, please consider supporting her on Patreon.
For this episode, I sat down with Elyse Rivin of Toulouse Guided Walks to talk about Catherine and Marie De Medici, two Italian banker's daughters who each married into the French crown and ended up running the country in all but name. In France, queens don't reign. Catherine and Marie De Medici never had that title officially, but between the two of them they cover the entire 1500s and into the 1600s, and they left their mark on Paris in ways you can still walk through today.
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Catherine: An Orphan With No Say
Catherine de' Medici was orphaned young and raised under the protection of her uncle, the Pope. At 15 she was married off to Henry, the second son of King François I, a match arranged because her family, however wealthy, wasn't considered to have royal blood. She arrived in France well-educated in languages and mathematics, and discovered her new husband was devoted to his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, who was 19 years his senior.
Catherine didn't have a child for ten years, which put her at real risk of being sent back. Once a doctor identified the problem, she went on to have ten children, three of whom became kings of France in turn: François II, Charles IX, and Henry III. Her husband, Henry II, died in 1559 after a jousting accident on what's now the Rue Saint-Antoine, near the Place des Vosges. Catherine wore black for the rest of her life and was known as the Black Widow.
She ruled as regent through her sons' reigns, tried to broker peace between Catholics and Protestants on a two-year tour of France, and got blamed for the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572, even though the massacre wasn't her doing. She died in 1589, a few months before her last surviving son was assassinated, ending the Valois dynasty.
Marie: Married by Proxy to a Man She'd Never Met
Marie De Medici, a cousin of Catherine's, came into the picture because France owed the Medici family an enormous debt. She married Henry IV of France, first King of the Bourbon dynasty, in a proxy wedding in Marseille. Henry didn't even bother to show up. She met her husband, and his mistress, and his many children by other women, only after arriving in France.
Unlike Catherine, Marie got pregnant right away and had six children in ten years, including the future Louis XIII. But life at court meant constant mockery over her Italian accent and her Italian advisors, particularly Concino Concini and his wife Leonora. Marie wasn't crowned queen until 1610, and the very next day, Henry IV was assassinated in Paris.
She became regent for her eight-year-old son and made sure everyone knew she intended to keep ruling. When Louis XIII came of age, he had her advisor Concini killed and his wife executed, then exiled his own mother to the Château de Blois. Marie escaped by climbing out a window, tried to raise an army against her son, and spent the last twelve years of her life bouncing between Brussels, England, and Germany, still trying to get back into power. She died in Cologne in 1642, never having returned to France.
What They Left Behind
Whatever people made of Catherine and Marie De Medici at the time, both women left a permanent mark on Paris. Catherine built the Tuileries Palace and its Italian-style gardens; the palace is gone, but the gardens remain. Marie built the Luxembourg Palace, now home to the French Senate, and its gardens, and commissioned the Rubens gallery you can see at the Louvre today, depicting her life alongside Henry IV.
There's no magazine segment this week. The recording ran long, and I was traveling in southern Brittany, where I'll actually be posting some updates in French while I'm here.
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TranscriptCategory: French History