"Anne-Marie Fauques de Vaucluse, a Tiger among the Bluestockings."

Anne-Marie Fauques de Vaucluse (1720-1804) fled from France to England in 1756 to avoid the Bastille for writing a book denouncing the tyranny of Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour. The French government did everything it could to get her arrested and her book suppressed but did not succeed.





Known as "Madame de Vaucluse" she was a poet, novelist, political satirist, author of philosophical tales, fierce feminist and animal rights advocate, whose life was improbable, unconventional and complicated. Her lovers included Charles Edward Stuart the Young Pretender, an ambassador and an Italian opera-singer. 

In England she became a friend of John Cleland, Elizabeth Craven and William Beckford, many of whose letters to her survive. She was welcomed among the Bluestockings as a learned lady, though it might have raised eyebrows if they had known about her previous disreputable existence as a seditious ex-nun, friend of spies and clandestine intellectuals, a person who had seen the inside of more than one debtors' prison.

Fauques' books were as extraordinary and unconventional as her life. In her youth she advocated free love. In her old age she translated Voltaire's epic poem The Henriade into English  - all ten cantos of it.


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