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"The Celebrated Madame Campan": Educating Republican Mothers à la Française in Nineteenth-Century America
Heaton, Lydia
Heaton, Lydia
Abstract
Marie Antoinette’s former lady-in-waiting and founder of an internationally acclaimed boarding school for girls, Madame Campan (1752-1822) taught both Napoleon Bonaparte’s stepdaughter and President James Monroe’s eldest daughter. She also published a popular memoir of Marie Antoinette’s life and several educational tracts. While Campan has been largely forgotten today, she is more closely connected to the development of American ideas about female education and republican motherhood than has yet been represented in the historiographical record. The French headmistress carefully crafted an educational system that proved to be influential on the development of American institutional education for girls. Furthermore, the maternal persona that Campan crafted at her school and in her writings took on a life of its own in the hands of nineteenth-century American periodical editors. This thesis examines the impact of Madame Campan’s life and legacy on the way that Americans thought about the role of mothers in civil society and civic life.
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2019-04-01
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History