A Renaissance soul
L’Amor Donna, Ch’Io Te Porto (Anonymous, 16th century) Syntagma Musicum.
The life of Marguerite de Navarre
Marguerite de Navarre was born in April 1492 in Angoulême, into a branch of the Capetian dynasty. Her father died when she was still a child, and her mother, Louise of Savoy, oversaw an exceptional education in which books played a central role. Marguerite learned Latin, Greek, Spanish, and Italian. Louise, Marguerite, and François—her adored younger brother—formed a remarkably close trio.
At seventeen, Marguerite married the Duke of Alençon, one of the wealthiest men in the kingdom. Together with her mother and brother, she hoped to take an active part in public affairs. And indeed, when King Louis XII died without a male heir, her brother ascended the throne as Francis I in 1515. The new king held his sister in the highest esteem and trusted her completely. According to Brantôme, he consulted her on countless matters, and foreign ambassadors were struck by her intelligence and diplomatic skill.
At the same time, Marguerite published her first works and became the protector of the Cercle de Meaux, a group of scholars who sought to rethink Catholic ritual and return to the sources of Scripture. The Sorbonne—the theological faculty of Paris—viewed these initiatives with deep suspicion, as they bordered on Lutheran ideas.
A Political Role
In 1525, catastrophe struck the kingdom: Francis I was taken prisoner by Charles V at the Battle of Pavia. To make matters worse, Marguerite’s husband was accused of contributing to the defeat. Crushed by shame and weakened by illness, he died later that year despite Marguerite’s care.
But she had no time to grieve. Her mother, now regent of France, sent her at the head of an extraordinary embassy of three hundred horsemen to negotiate the king’s release in Madrid. Marguerite narrowly saved her brother, whom she found in a near-comatose state, but she was unable to bring him home—Charles V remained unmoved.
When Francis I finally returned to France a few months later, Marguerite became Queen of Navarre through her marriage to Henri d’Albret in 1527, a hot-blooded and somewhat impulsive prince obsessed with recovering lost territories. While tempering her husband’s expansionist ambitions, she continued to play a significant political role in France, sitting on the King’s Council and helping her mother negotiate the “Ladies’ Peace” of 1529.
Inner retreat
In 1533, a reprint of one of Marguerite’s works (The Mirror of the Sinful Soul) provoked outrage at the Sorbonne. Francis I stood by his sister against uncompromising conservatives. But the Affair of the Placards in 1534 changed everything. Booksellers were burned at the stake in the Place Maubert, and torture soon appeared in Geneva as well.
Marguerite understood that her hopes for reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant reformers had no future: the age was moving toward confrontation, not dialogue.
In 1540, Francis I clashed with Marguerite over the marriage of her daughter, Jeanne d’Albret (the future mother of Henry IV). The Queen of Navarre withdrew to her estates, especially Mont-de-Marsan and Nérac, where many of the persecuted found refuge. Marguerite was now in her fifties. Her writings from these later years—rediscovered only in 1895—show a remarkable artistic maturity and pursue her lifelong meditation on love and faith. Shattered by her brother’s death in 1547, she died two years later at the age of fifty-seven.
“As for me, I feel nothing but love within my heart.”
La distinction du vrai amour
Marguerite and her time
Marguerite de Navarre’s life coincided with what historians call the first Renaissance—the most serene phase—before conflict between Catholics and Protestants erupted into open war. She embodied the best of that moment: beyond her diplomatic and political influence, she strongly supported the cultural program of her brother, who created the Collège de France and established chairs in Greek and Hebrew at the university. She protected scholars who sought to return to the biblical sources, and she was herself one of the notable writers of the age. When both Protestant and Catholic positions hardened, Marguerite defended a path of tolerance and freedom within Catholicism.
Inquiry and questioning
Though she personifies the intellectual vitality of the period, Marguerite de Navarre also reflects its turbulence. Her writings testify to her intense search for happiness, her disillusionment with love and with literature, and her metaphysical concerns about salvation and grace—particularly in the Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan.
“How could we not love, in God’s name, such a heroine? Such an Amazon?”
— Erasmus, on Marguerite de Navarre
Her place in literary history
Her birth year, 1492, also marks the end of the Middle Ages. The Queen of Navarre inherited the legacy of fabliaux, mysteries, and the dialogues of Christine de Pizan, yet she also heralded a new era. Before Ronsard, she must be regarded as the first true lyric poet of French literature (Les Adieux). Her collection L’Heptaméron, inspired by Boccaccio, stands as one of the ancestors of the modern short story.
L’Heptaméron appeared in its complete form in 1558, but it was only in 1895 that Abel Lefranc made the astonishing discovery of a chest containing Marguerite’s final poems, preserved by her daughter Jeanne d’Albret. Even though Renaissance poetry was of interest mainly to scholars by that time, these discoveries opened new perspectives on Marguerite’s work.
Women and authorship
In an age when men overwhelmingly dominated literary life, Marguerite de Navarre played a crucial role in opening the path for women to become authors. She was not the first woman in French literature to publish under her own name, yet her social and political status, her charisma, and the breadth of her talent encouraged many others to write.
“Time invented the arts.”
Marguerite de Navarre, Chanson.
Marguerite de Navarre, an extraordinary writer
Marguerite’s literary work traces an extraordinary personal journey: after a relatively conventional beginning (Dialogues), she increasingly asserted her own voice. Her poetry became an ever more direct expression of her inner turmoil, reaching its peak in her final poems, where she acknowledges both failure and the need for silence.
Across the tales of the Heptaméron, in her plays, and in her long and short poems alike, Marguerite interrogates the nature of love—its flaws, its beauty, its seductions, and its disappointments. And even as she strives to “rise in hope” toward divine love, the ascent remains ambivalent: this queen loved the sensations of earthly love—its caresses, verses, promises, impulses, and quickened heartbeats.