Simon Burrows - The Chevalier dEon and his Worlds

Edited by
Simon Burrows, Jonathan Conlin,
Russell Goulbourne and Valerie Mainz

Charles-Genevive-Louis-Auguste-Andr-Timothe dEon de Beaumont (5 October 172821 May 1810), usually known as the Chevalier dEon, was a French diplomat, spy, soldier and Freemason who lived the first half of his life as a man and the second half as a woman. Thus, does the entry in Wikipedia succinctly present the subject/topic of this important new collection of scholarly papers that aim to bring historical depth and analytical rigour to a racy story. A famous Dragoon and fencer of considerable skill, a member of the secret service of Louis XV charged with sensitive diplomatic missions to Russia and Great Britain, the Chevalier dEons gender became the topic of a wager in fashionable London in the early 1770s. Although the issue was never tested and proven, the Chevalier chose to/was obliged to dress as a woman and lived and wrote as a woman throughout the rest of her life, even offering to form a battalion of women to fight in the post-Revolutionary wars. How can we make sense of this archive, this story, this episode? Is it a matter for historians, political theorists, art historians, costume historians, or biographers of his spiritual quest and right to decide a gender? Or can such a complex case only be grasped through the many lenses of each of these specializations?

This collection of papers on the fascinating, challenging and perplexing figure of the Chevalier dEon is, therefore, an exemplary transdisciplinary project. Transdisciplinary is not identical with interdisciplinary. There is no intention to mix and match different approaches in the hope of creating a third way. Instead, the aim is to present something more akin to seeing a scene through a kaleidoscope. A single object of study an eighteenth-century French, transgendering, international diplomat and spy, a master-fencer, and author of both spiritual reflections and political autobiographies is examined from as many different angles and perspectives as the complexity of his/her life, work, representations by self and by others, political affiliations and contexts, friendships and intellectual competitions, intersections with pre-Revolutionary international relations and political theory demands. The Chevalier dEon presents the assembled array of historians, literary specialists, costume historians, art historians, local and regional historians, political theorists, and biographers with challenges to each of their disciplinary modes of analysis because the case defies any one scholar or discipline. What can we know about this extraordinary historical figure unless we bring together the techniques and methods of every one of these disciplines into whose field of expertise this historical archive intervenes? Thus, the transdisciplinary is the experience of expanded knowledge and multi-focal understanding gained by the reader, who is offered here a range of detailed, disciplinary analyses of the varied aspects of a historical person and his/her intriguing, politically charged and visually fascinating moment.

This superb collection was initiated by the convergence of an historian, an art Scholars interested in this case were obliged to come to Leeds to do their research. Thus, it made sense for the University of Leeds to initiate an expanded study of the resources on its doorstep by soliciting work on the Chevalier from a wide range of international scholars, with the ambition of critically analyzing not only a fascinating episode from eighteenth-century British/French relations and pre-Revolutionary political culture, but also an historical case study full of resonances for contemporary queer and transgender studies. DEons change of gender identity not only leads scholars to investigate his/her own writings on self, gender and identity, which are shaped in late-eighteenth-century modes of spiritual autobiography and theories of gender, but also demands visual analysis of the prints, paintings and cartoons that this extraordinary personal transformation inspired and troubled. While historians may draw on contemporary visual imagery as supplementary evidence or as documentation, the art historian analyzes the semiotic and visual conventions used in each different system of representation, from engraved portraiture to political cartooning, each tradition in turn also being shaped by local and national histories of image-making and political/aesthetic vocabularies. The images need to be read as themselves specific sites for the articulation of the meanings of bodies, genders, national and political identities.