by Karen-Claire Voss
Published
in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism Brill:
Bathilde
d’Orléans was born in the château of Saint-Cloud
just outside
The three most important influences on Bathilde were Freemasonry, Christian Theosophy and animal magnetism. The participation of women from
the high nobility in “Adoption Freemasonry” (so called because of its “adoption”,
i.e. acceptance, of women as members) was common in this period and Bathilde
entered Freemasonry in 1775 at the latest, joining the Masonic lodge Saint-Jean
de la Candeur (established in 1775) in Paris. “Lodges
of Adoption” had begun to appear in
The great Christian theosopher à Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin was an important influence
as well; his Ecce Homo (1792) was written specifically for Bathilde.
Along with other favorites, among them Franz Anton Mesmer
and Bacon de la Chevalerie, he was installed from
time to time at her château in Petitbourg, where
her confessor Pierre Pontard celebrated mass. Saint-Martin
was an intimate of à Jean-Baptiste Willermoz,
who practiced mesmerism and was helped in deciphering the hieroglyphic messages
he allegedly received from God by Saint-Martin. In striking contrast to Willermoz, however, Saint-Martin (described by one contemporary
historian as a ‘metaphysical consultant to mesmerists’) sought to spiritualize
mesmerist principles. He combined them with more mystical ideas because he
thought mesmerism too materialistic and liable to make persons vulnerable
to what he termed “astral intelligences”; it is against such “magical” practice
that he wrote Ecce Homo. Bathilde’s closest friend was the Baroness d’Oberkirch of
As early as 1789, Bathilde had espoused revolutionary ideas, along with her brother, Philippe Egalité, and around that time became involved with two other mystics, Suzette Labrousse and Cathérine Théot (the so-called “Mother of God”), who combined mysticism with political ideals. Bathilde underwrote the publication of Labrousse’s Journal Prophétique, containing prophecies and criticisms of the nobility and the clergy, and edited by Pierre Pontard.
She did a great deal of charitable work; e.g., in Petitbourg she founded a hospice, where frequently she personally attended to patients. She also studied intensely, and produced two original works, including a book length study based on her experience of administering a fifteen-month long treatment of animal magnetism to a patient in Petitbourg, and her Opuscules. The latter contain an account of how she was attracted to the life of the spirit while young, was later led astray, and how, after her marriage ended, she sought out a confessor and renewed her interior journey. From that time on, it is clear that Bathilde conscientiously attended to the details of daily life simply because she believed them important to her spiritual well-being. She believed that one always has a choice with respect to the quality with which one does even ordinary things, writing for example that ‘... at each moment we breathe and we are able to pump life or death by all the movements which constitute our physical, moral and spiritual being’. In the Introduction she says that on the advice of a ‘wise man’ (possibly Saint-Martin), she ‘abandoned herself to prayer . . . while practicing good works’. In a statement characteristic of her attitude, she writes: ‘I received some inner illumination and consolation which detached me more and more from all of creation, in order to live only in and for God ... this precious pearl ... is enough ...’. According to her, it was Providence that had helped her to find the works of Mme. Guyon, which led her to the ‘heart of my religion’. She regarded ‘all terrestrial nature’ as ‘an open book in which we can read the secrets of spiritual nature’, describes the passage of angelic spirits into human beings at the moment of our birth, and adopts the Christian theosophical idea that Adam was originally an androgynous being who was separated into two sexes as a result of original sin. The Opuscules contain an original and carefully elucidated articulation of the difference between the “visible” or “teaching” church and the “invisible” or “working” church. It must be noted that the term “interior Church” is never used by Saint-Martin nor by his friends, and first came into use in 1798 through the publication in French of Quelques traits de l’Eglise intérieure by à A.V. Lopuchin. Bathilde may have borrowed it from there. But quite as interestingly, Bathilde does give it a sense very different from Lopuchin’s: ‘The visible Church is … in my view the schism which broke out since the Apostles, against the true interior Church which is almighty and all pure in the bosom of her divine Master’. Closely linked to this distinction is the one she makes between the “teaching church” and the “working church”: the former ‘is visible to the eyes of the body’, whereas the latter is visible ‘to the eyes of the soul’. She also says that once one ‘possesses the Word in one self’ one is enabled ‘to truly effect divine works’; here again, she shows she is more concerned with what one does than with what one says.
Bathilde would not escape the wrath of the Revolution. Her wealth and property were confiscated; she was imprisoned in 1793, then released in 1795. Relegated to the provinces, she settled in Petitbourg, until a decree of exile in 1797, when she was banished to Spain. Bathilde refers to a certain Ruffin as one of the guards who escorted her to the Spanish border, and writes that during the journey a great spiritual understanding sprung up between the two. The identity of this man, whom Bathilde usually addresses as ‘mon bon ange’, has never been definitively established. Two volumes of her voluminous correspondence are devoted to letters sent to him while she was in exile; they were published in 1812.
Although Bathilde had been something of an accomplished harpist, it would appear that she later came to see music as a kind of indulgence: in one of her letters to Ruffin she strongly advises him to beware of music, because it ‘turns us away from the pure and saintly source’ and makes us ‘run the risk of losing precious time’. In these letters we can also read her theosophical interpretations of the Fall of Lucifer and Adam, her arithmological views, and quotations from various theosophers to be read by Ruffin; e.g., à Dutoit-Membrini and à William Law. She gives Ruffin her opinion about the French Revolution, which she saw as part of the workings ‘of the great machine of the universe’, a means for God to save ‘as many people as possible’; and using an almost alchemical image, she writes that ‘it is God who purifies the water, and who by his action on it liquefies all the parts’. Unwavering in her view of earthly trials as unimportant in the face of the heavenly future, she adapted to greatly reduced circumstances. Her life became become more embittered after her son, the Duke of Enghein (born in 1772), had been executed in 1804 upon an order given by Napoleon. Finally granted permission by Napoleon to return to France, she went back to Paris in 1814, where she more or less reconstituted her old circle. On January 10, 1822, she suffered a stroke and died later the same day.
Bathilde d’Orléans’ life and work is worth further study. The great historian Auguste Viatte may have been instrumental in creating the impression of Bathilde as being somewhat naive, almost certainly neurasthenic, and superficial. His account implicitly compares her to the “prudent” Saint-Martin, who warned her against over-involvement with somnambulists and advised her to abandon herself to prayer, Bible reading, and good works. While Viatte’s account is valuable inasmuch as she is otherwise neglected in the literature, delving deeper into the primary sources indicates she was more formidable than one might otherwise surmise. She undeniably deliberately and consciously attempted to embody her spiritual convictions, by trying to make what she said and did in daily life correspond to her spiritual convictions.
Correspondence entre Mme de Bourbon et M. (Ruffein)
sur leur expressions religieuses, 2 vols.,
Lit.: Janet Mackay Burke,
Sociability, Friendship
and the Enlightenment among Women Freemasons
in Eighteenth-century
Karen-Claire Voss