The queen who instituted the ballet de cour, Catherine de’ Medici: Women’s History Month in Dance, 2021

Women’s History Month in Dance, 29. Thanks to Catherine de’ Medici (1519-1589), an Italian noblewoman who married into the royal family of France, ballet became a French art of international renown. It is not important whether she herself danced in her youth. In her mature years, she became the patron whose commissions changed dance history.

Nothing in her first forty years presaged the importance she would later have. She was brought up in Florence and Rome as Caterina de’ Medici, a member of the illustrious Medici family, an heiress steeped in the connections between political power and the arts, niece to Pope Clement VII. At age fourteen, in 1533, she was married to Henri, second son of king Francois I of France. Since she was not a princess, many at the court of France felt Henri (who was also fourteen years old) had been thrown away on a parvenue - especially after the death of her uncle the Pope, in 1534, one year after her marriage. French hopes were pinned on some much more brilliant marriage for Henri’s elder brother, the strong and handsome dauphin François. 

But François died unexpectedly at age eighteen, in 1536. Henri became dauphin of France for the next eleven years. Henri had mistresses, publicly acknowledged. He visited Catherine sexually, for the need of legitimate heirs - but until 1544 she failed to conceive. During that period, Henri had a child by another woman. There were discussions that the childless Catherine should be legally repudiated and divorced. Henri also began a long affair with Diane de Poitiers, twenty years his senior, an intelligent women who enjoyed and used power. Fortunately for Catherine, she began to have children in her mid-twenties - not one but ten, in less than thirteen years. Seven of those children (four sons, three daughters) survived infancy. 

During those years of successive childbirths, her father-in-law died. Catherine became Queen, but with minimal power. King Henri gave extreme publicity to his mistress Diane (fondling her breasts or sitting on her lap before visiting ambassadors while talking politics). Nonetheless Catherine’s children became fabulously eligible for the royal marriage market. Her eldest son François was married to the child Mary Queen of Scots; her eldest daughter Elizabeth was married to king Philip II of Spain.

In 1559, King Henri died, after a horrifying jousting accident witnessed by his wife and the court. For the next thirty years, Catherine wore mourning. But, as dowager, she now wielded immense influence through her now royal sons. 

Few of her children, however, enjoyed long lives; and none provided France with a legitimate male heir to the throne - in an era when only men could succeed and could only inherit through the male line. Catherine’s eldest son, François II, died within less than two years of taking the throne, aged sixteen, of an ear condition (after other ailments), in 1560. His brother and successor Charles IX lived into his twenties, married the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, and had a daughter (only men could inherit the French throne) - but died of tuberculosis in 1574 at age twenty-three. His brother and successor Henri III died at age thirty-seven, married but childless, seven months after Catherine herself. A fourth son, François, duke of Anjou, was a suitor to the much older Elizabeth I of England for some years, but to no avail. (He died of malaria at age twenty-nine, childless.) The only one of Catherine’s children to live (considerably) past the age of forty was her daughter Marguérite, who was married young to Henri, king of Navarre and the heir to the French throne after Catherine’s sons. But Marguérite proved sterile; her marriage was to Henri of Navarre was long - she became queen consort in 1589, seventeen years after her wedding - and tempestuous (Henri kept reverting to Protestantism, both spouses may have had lovers) but eventually annulled in 1599, ten years after Catherine’s death.

All this brought sorrow to France. Catherine herself, however, brought further sorrow by her participation in the intense oppression of the French Protestants, most notoriously in the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day (1572), when thousands of Huguenots were killed, possibly at Catherine’s command. 

This was the grim climate in which Catherine promoted ballet as an art of harmonious royal and aristocratic spectacle, a form of deliberate and costly propaganda. You remember that in 1958, George Balanchine issued a famous statement on woman as allegory: “Put sixteen women onstage and it’s everybody, it’s the world. But put sixteen men on and it’s always nobody.” In 1573, the French court had already demonstrated that: sixteen court ladies danced the hour-long “Ballet des Polonaise” in choreography by Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx (often spelt Beaujoyeux), the originally Italian dancing master (Baldassarino del Belgioioso). The sixteen women represented the sixteen provinces of France, moving through seeming tensions to arrive at a richer harmony. The ballet was a triumph of expressive geometry. The court observer Brantome wrote that the sixteen women “danced their ballet so curiously designed, with so many turns, swerves, and sinuosities, interlacings and minglings, confrontations and withdrawals, that [it was surprising that] no lady ever failed to be at her appointed turn or place.” Did it also persuade anyone that the slaughter of thousands of Huguenots the previous year was immaterial to the harmony of France? 

This peak of Renaissance choreography was planned by Catherine to impress the visiting Polish ambassadors. Charles IX was still king; the Polish visitors were part of a negotiation to make Catherine’s next son, her favourite Henri, the “elected” king of Poland. The embassy succeeded: Henri became king of Poland. (But not for long. He only reached Poland in January 1574; when he heard that June that his brother Charles had died at the end of May, he returned to France, soon forfeiting the Polish throne.)

The artistic marvel of the Ballet des Polonais was surpassed in 1581, with the “Ballet Comique de la Reine” (in old spelling, “Balet Comique de la Royne”), “the Dance Drama of the Queen”, a five-hour narrative event enacted with spectacular scenic effects, choreographed again by de Beaujoyeulx. Both Henri III and his wife Queen Louise took part; Louise, officially, was the queen who presented this epic pageant to the world. The audience was vast. Written accounts were published across Europe. 

Yet this too was propaganda, a vast masquerade to disguise a sham. Officially, the ballet was presented by queen Louise, now in her late twenties. Really, it was administrated by his mother Catherine, now in her early sixties. Henri was notorious for his male favourites (mignons), who, along with his childlessness, gave rise to widespread rumours about his passionate homosexuality. One of these mignons, was the duke of Joyeuse (his first name was Anne); the cue for the Ballet Comique was his arranged marriage to poor Louise’s sister Marguérite. 

Did the ballet persuade anyone that Henri III was successfully heterosexual? (He may have been; historians still differ. But presenting a ballet is an odd way to argue the point.) Or did the ballet persuade anyone that France was a harmonious realm? Anne de Joyeuse later organised the massacre of several more thousand Huguenots, and died as childless as the king he served, during Catherine’s lifetime. Seven months after Catherine’s death, king Henri himself was assassinated.

These are the highly unpromising political circumstances in which ballet became central to French court life. Catherine, a true product of the Italian Renaissance, did much for all the arts, not least painting. But ballet above all was the vehicle she chose for political statements. She invented the ballet de cour, in which kings, queens, and courtiers danced to an admiring public. The tradition lasted across Europe, to some degree until the 1760s: a famous painting shows the young Marie-Antoinette and two of her brothers dancing a juvenile ballet de cour. The connection of ballet style to royal deportment was crucial for centuries. 

Yet there were and remain many reasons why we should not regard any royal family as exemplary. In Catherine de Medici we see the full and partly appalling complexity of ballet’s historical implications.

Thursday 11 March 

Catherine de’ Medici (1519-1589), c.1560: workshop of François Clouet.