Cher espoir de la nation sainte: The Maison Royale de Saint Louis at Saint -Cy

This dissertation examines the Maison Royale de Saint Louis at Saint-Cyr, a school established in France by Madame de Maintenon for the education of noble girls in 1689. The first part of the dissertation looks at the social, religious, and pedagogical context of Saint-Cyr, in particular, the influence of the Catholic Reformation. The second part of the dissertation examines more closely important aspects of the school's curriculum: the theater, geography and the library.;This study challenges existing historiography by offering a comprehensive analysis of Saint-Cyr's role in the history of female education, its place in the context of seventeenth-century Catholic Reformation movements and its legacy in the eighteenth century, in France and abroad. Saint-Cyr's stated mission was to educate the daughters of the "poor" provincial nobility. The idea of female virtue and a woman's role in society, as we see it in Saint-Cyr, had its roots in the cultural milieu of the old provincial nobility, a milieu that drew its cultural underpinnings from the Classical tradition of virtue, especially female virtue, and from the parallel Christian tradition of virtue, itself heavily influenced by that same Classical tradition. Elements of the traditional values of the provincial French nobility served as a foundation for Saint-Cyr. The school's curriculum is thus linked in this study to the traditional ideology of the provincial French nobility.