Another Side of the Chevalier d’Eon

I’m recommending this podcast lecture from the National Archives in Britain:. It’s titled “The Chevalier d’Eon: Transgender Diplomat at the Court of George III, 1763-1777,” but it’s really about that French nobleman’s career in Britain before he decided to live as a woman full-time (which is the part of his life everyone talks about).

The speaker, Jonathan Conlin from the University of Southampton, draws parallels between D’Eon and the British politician John Wilkes. In 1763, each man fell afoul of his own country’s government and took refuge in the other. For Wilkes, life in France was only a short-term exile. For D’Eon, Britain would be his home for another decade, and the refuge where he returned for good during the French Revolution.

As Conlin explains, D’Eon first arrived in London as a diplomat helping to negotiate the end of the Seven Years’ War, and then in early 1763 became France’s highest diplomat in London—as well as the coordinator of a ring of spies scouting for vulnerabilities in British shoreline defenses for when the next war came.

After only a few months the French government appointed someone in D’Eon’s place, and he simply refused to come home. What’s more, the chevalier started a pamphlet war in London, arguing that his government was treating him unjustly. He published some of the diplomatic correspondence he possessed, an implicit threat to publish even more sensitive documents.

Conlin describes how D’Eon, though writing only in French, adopted the Wilkesite rhetoric of justice threatened by a corrupt government. And Wilkes’s followers in London protected the French aristocrat from capture by his countrymen.

This lecture stops when D’Eon and the French monarchy reached an accommodation in the late 1760s. Later they’d make another deal that allowed him to return to France and adopt a female identity. Only then, it appears, did the chevalier rewrite his/her earlier career to claim that he/she had been a woman all along.