Born: March 3, 1756
Died: January 15, 1815
Known For: Tragic Actress, Hoe4Life, Leader of the French Sexual Revolution
Mademoiselle Raucourt, the Priestess of Parisian Lesbos and Leader of a French Sex Revolution. © Historical Homos 2020.
Prélude: The French Sexual Revolution
François Boucher, Jupiter et Callisto. 1744. Oil. (Wikimedia Commons)
Little did you know: The French Revolution was also a Sexual Revolution.
In the late 1780s, Parisian perverts of every flavor and human fluid reached an absolutely buckwild peak in the City of Lights — including homos, lezzies and unclassifiable queers of every description.
They had different names for them back then. The buggering boys were sodomites — so was anyone who did anal, by the way, including the putains (female whores) — and the fingerlicking ladies were tribades.
The most famous of all Parisian tribades — from the ancient Greek tribo, “to rub” — was the sensational, scandalous and royally sponsored Mademoiselle Raucourt:
“There exists, it is said, a society known by the name of the Lodge of Lesbos, but their assemblies are … mysterious …. There, one is initiated into all the secrets which Juvenal describes so frankly and naively in his 16th satire [i.e. girls banging each other]…It is said that our superb Galathée [Raucourt] is one of the chief priestesses of the Temple.” (Correspondance Littéraire).
As the “Priestess of Lesbos,” Raucourt’s sapphic exploits were very public knowledge in the city’s oversexed circles of nobles and artists. Public secrets like hers also traversed Europe and the Americas in a networked Republic of Letters, which included the exchange of pornographic pamphlets, gossiping journals, personal letters and private memoirs.
From the days of Queen Marie Antoinette to the Revolution to Napoleon’s Empire and even the Bourbon Restoration, La Raucourt openly flaunted her affairs with men and women, made no secret of her preference for the latter and eventually secured her place, as Diderot once wrote of her, as “the most famous of our modern lesbians.”
Act I: The Hottest Thesbian in Town
Sophie Arnould, top left, was Mademoiselle Raucourt’s long-time lesbian lover and the only tribade to rival her reputation. © Historical Homos 2020.
Françoise-Marie-Antoinette Saucerotte, or La Raucourt as she was later known, got her first big break at 16, when she joined the nation’s premier theatre, the Comédie Française, and performed the role of Dido to star-making acclaim in 1772.
Her imposing stature, her beauty, her powerful voice and her early training (her father had been a mediocre travelling actor) turned her into a star overnight.
With great fame came great riches and even greater lovers. Raucourt quickly signaled to her admiring public that while she wasn’t above boning boys for a nice new necklace, her tastes were decidedly more vaginal. And the gossip rags agreed:
Mlle de Raucoux [sic] of the Comédie Française, who is obsessed with her own sex…has given up the Marquis de Bièvre to surrender herself to it more freely.
Mlle. de Raucoux de la Comédie Françoise, qui raffole de son sexe… a renoncé au Marquis de Bievre, pour s’y livrer plus à son aise. (Mémoires secrets, 1774)
Paris in the 1770s was a hotspot for “thesbians” like Raucourt. Within the mysterious Lodge of Lesbos, Raucourt’s only rival was Sophie Arnould, the slightly older and equally famous actress-singer at Paris’ Opéra.
And they weren’t alone. As a long-running tabloid, the Mémoires secrets, recorded in 1774:
The vice of the Tribades is becoming very fashionable among our little ladies at the Opéra: they make no mystery of it and treat this peccadillo with kindness.
“Le vice des Tribades devient fort à la mode parmi nos Demoiselles d’Opéra: elles n’en font point mystere et traitent de gentillesse cette peccadille.” (Mémoires secrets)
Mademoiselle Raucourt, portrayed in one of her famous roles as Queen Cleopatra. (Gallica)
It seems the ravenous Raucourt landed in the right place at the right time. After more than a century of libertines and Enlightenment philosophy, Paris was undergoing nothing short of a sexual Revolution.
Suddenly the brightest minds and richest libidos agreed: man-on-man and woman-on-woman were tried, true and trivially private “vices”.
In their new world, every individual had a right to sin.
Unfortunately, Raucourt’s tastes got the best of her and by 1776 she was in debt for over 100x her annual income, forcing her to flee the city.
She ran away to Brussels to escape her creditors. When she got back in 1779, the Comédie-Française refused to re-admit her, branding her a #hoe4life and protesting that they were too decent to mix with her kind.
(By the way, for a group of actors to say you were too dirty in 1779 Paris was like one of the Real Housewives saying you were too unhinged to sit with them on Watch What Happens Live.)
Luckily, Raucourt had friends in high places. Queen Marie Antoinette — later rumoured to have vulvular tastes herself — promptly persuaded King Louis XVI to force the Comédie to reinstate her.
Armed with royal patronage, Raucourt took back her lesbionic priestesshood and the limelight. She soon re-appeared in her trademark role as Dido, and while some in the audience hissed, her (literal) bosom-buddy Sophie Arnould ensured a “cabal of tribades” was there to applaud from the orchestra.
Interlude: A Very Bad, Very Queer Play
Le Chevalier d’Éon. A contemporary of Mademoiselle Raucourt, he reportedly drag-queened his way through his career as a spy in the French army. © Historical Homos 2020.
In 1782, Raucourt went full butch. After several stints in all her old tragic roles – Cleopatra, Phaedra, Dido and Iphigenia – she decided to write her own gender-bending farce.
The play took up one of the most common themes in 18th century lesbianism and gender more broadly: cross-dressing in the army.
For this contemporary work, Raucourt transformed herself into the Comtesse de Saltzbourg, a romantically challenged noblewoman who dresses up as a soldier to go after a Prussian colonel she’s in love with. A joyous farce of queer nonsense.
The play was a flop, but her critics still remarked how well-suited to the role Raucourt was — one even said she looked “infinitely better as a man than a woman”. (In real life, Raucourt loved to drag it up, and regularly went out with her girls in gentleman’s clothes.)
After this hiccup, Raucourt kept up a magnificent career at the Comédie Française, despite the continued publication of all sorts of saucy pamphlets detailing her sexual proclivities.
And then, in 1789, the actual Revolution hit.
Act II: A Literal Fucking Revolution
Cover page of Les Enfans de Sodome à l’Assemblée Nationale, 1790.
As a known royal brown-noser, Raucourt was in trouble when the Revolutionaries came to power.
She was swiftly imprisoned with several other prominent actors at the Comédie Française, and later only escaped thanks to the devotion of one of her admirers.
While the real Raucourt rotted in the clink, the public saw her appear in a series of bizarre pamphlets, published in 1790-91 and known today as The Children of Sodom at the National Assembly.
These satirical petitions followed several imaginary speakers, who address the new Revolutionary government in order to lobby for the rights of sodomites, tribades, assorted enculeurs (‘buttfuckers’) and plain old putains (“hookers”).
One of the orators in this spoof is Mademoiselle Raucourt herself. Speaking to her queerly beloved audience from the stage of the Comédie-Française, she persuades them to side with the sodomites and make sure women’s lesbionic rights to get off with one other are protected by the government.
La Nouvelle Sapho (1793). A contemporary spoof of secret societies of tribades. The original caption beneath reads: “My beautiful leader, and my dear companions, here is a postulant.”
Under no circumstances, Raucourt argues, should she or her followers ever have to be submitted to “ordinary fucking” (“la fouterie ordinaire”) – by which she meant terrifyingly normal, heterosexual sex.
These pamphlets were parodies of Revolutionary leaders, who publicly tried to philosophize away centuries of French social tradition in their blood-stained campaign against the Ancien Régime.
Raucourt’s address to her devoted ‘sect’ of vagina-enthusiasts was equally a spoof of the old aristocratic world: the last thing the real Revolutionaries wanted to do was legitimize their old sexual excesses.
Yet, somehow, when they penned a new legal code in 1791, the Revolutionaries conspicuously forgot to criminalize sodomy (or tribadism, for that matter).
It seems France had simply gotten too gay to function any other way.
Act III: Rise and Fall
Napoleon deeply digging on Mademoiselle Raucourt. © Historical Homos 2020.
And then, Napoleon came.
Napoleon was a big fan of La Rugmunching Raucourt. Not long after he took power, he engineered her return to Parisian prominence by giving her a fat annual pension and entrusting her with one of his theatrical protégées: Mademoiselle George.
By 1801, Raucourt was 45 years old, well-off and living her best damn life in a cute little château outside the city of Orléans.
Two years later we have her writing to a new squeeze, Marie-Henriette Simonnot-Ponty, whom she’d met in prison during the Revolution.
Ponty would become the last great love of her life. The two soon shacked up at Raucourt’s mansion, like good lesbians do, and settled into their quieter pastures.
It wasn’t long before Napoleon dragged her out of this literal dream to help him popularize French culture on his campaign to dominate all Europe.
While on tour, the once hyperactive tribade wrote back tenderly to her ladylover:
“You are so necessary to my existence that far from you I am nothing but a shadow.” (Homosexuality in Modern France)
She spent several years abroad as a sort of cultural ambassador for Napoleon, directing a new troupe in Italy. (Because nothing takes the sting out of conquest like some good French theatre!). Raucourt arrived back in Paris shortly after this PR stunt and Napoleon’s imperial dream both fell apart in 1814.
The once all-powerful Priestess of Parisian Lesbians died in January 1815 in the arms of Ponty, her one true prison-love.
When the local parish refused to bury Raucourt, because of her hoe-ass ways, the public broke down the doors of the Church and started a literal riot.
In the end, the newly restored monarchs quieted them down by having her buried, like so many other luminaries of queer French fuckery, in the much more glamorous Père-Lachaise cemetery, where she lies undisturbed to this day.
Epilogue: An Inexplicable Passion
© Historical Homos 2020.
Mademoiselle Raucourt’s raucously scandalous life offers a glimpse of the little known Sexual Revolution that slithered out of the high-falutin’ Enlightenment’s underbelly.
Raucourt was nothing less than a sex symbol in an urban culture that gorged itself on public scandal, private gossip and sexual imagination.
Great philosophes like Denis Diderot were at a total loss to understand the passions of men who did men and women who did women: in his Encyclopedia he called both equally ‘inexplicable’.
But it was partly thinkers like him who made careers like Raucourt’s possible.
When she hit the scene in the swinging 1770s, Paris was the beating pulse of Europe’s intellectual, creative and sexual organs. Some of the bolder minds in this century of free(r) thinking had even argued that same-sex desire was nothing more than one of Nature’s variations on a theme.
And while most of the literate élite and dirt-poor public disdained anything they thought went against Nature — e.g., butt sex or mannish women — just as many revelled in the lampoons that stuck a girthy finger up at anyone who didn’t want in on the saucy fun.
It wasn’t a complete or perfect Sexual Revolution, but the public discourse around sex was a big step forward for queerkind.
The Paris that survived the Revolution became the premier melting pot of Europe’s greatest bougres (‘buggers’), bardaches (‘bottoms’), tribades (‘dykes’) and enculeurs (‘buttfuckers’), who would all come flocking to the legal and social freedoms afforded by 19th century Paris.
And it’s all because women like Raucourt publicly refused to submit to that most unthinkable horror of all horrors: “ordinary fucking”.
Mademoiselle Raucourt, the Priestess of Parisian Lesbos and French Sexual Revolutionary. © Historical Homos 2020.
Further Reading:
Crompton, Louis. Homosexuality and Civilization. 2003.
Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. 1998.
Merrick, Jeffrey (ed.). Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France: A Documentary History. 2019.
Merrick, Jeffrey and Ragan, Bryan (eds.). Homosexuality in Modern France. 1996.
Reed, Christopher. Art and Homosexuality. 2011.
de Reuilly, Jean. La Raucourt et ses Amies - étude historique des moeurs saphiques au XVIIIe siècle. 1909.