April 27, 2021 • 25 mins
The Chevalier d'Éon was a diplomat, spy, traitor, and international celebrity. She's also sometimes regarded as one of the most prominent transgender figures in European history.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky Listener, Discretion is advised.
In seventeen seventy one, the London Stock Exchange introduced a
betting pool at three two odds that the notorious cultural
(00:24):
figure the Chevalier Dion, whose long resume onto that point
included stints as a diplomat, spy, soldier and political writer,
was biologically a woman. This was an actual betting pool
that people bet actual money on. The interest in the
Chevalier des Genitalia became so frenzied that for a period
(00:47):
of time John couldn't leave her home without armed guards
because of all the strangers who were trying to physically
rip her clothes off and expose whatever was beneath, presumably
to their financial advantage. After a year, the betting pool
was abandoned because no progress was made on actually coming
up with a determination that was deemed satisfactory. If you
(01:12):
can possibly believe it, Dion wasn't willing to undergo a
public physical examination. But Dion's gender expression became such a
topic of public interest in the eighteenth century that the
Court of the King's Bench in England, and then ultimately
the French government would weigh in to issue formal declarations
(01:33):
that she was in fact a woman and would and
should be publicly treated as such. The Chevalier Deon is
one of history's most compelling and confounding figures, sometimes regarded
as a proto queer figure, the namesake for a number
of groups that support the transgender community. She is sometimes
(01:56):
incorrectly recognized as the first openly transgender person in Europe,
but that declaration is both an oversimplification of the Chevalier
and a fundamental misunderstanding of gender expression. Throughout history, trans
people have existed as long as people have existed, and
(02:17):
certainly the Chevalier Dion would not have thought of herself
as transgender, nor would she have had the vocabulary to
do so so. Perhaps understandably, there's plenty of confusion and
a good amount of disagreement, even among prominent historians about
the appropriate pronouns to use when we're talking about the
(02:37):
Chevalier personally. With the research and reading I've done, I've
decided to use female pronouns continually throughout the episode. Just
as the London Stock Exchange discovered barring an inspection of
a now corpses genitals. There's no quote unquote right answer
(02:58):
for the chevalier biological sex, and to me, even thinking
along those terms is well a little gross and intrusive,
not to mention, as you'll find out later on, pretty
unhelpful in the end. So what we do actually know
about the Chevalier is that she spent the last three
(03:19):
and a half decades of her life making it very
clear on an official and on a personal level that
she was a woman and wanted to be treated as such.
It feels like the very least I can do as
a podcaster telling her story to take her at her
word there. During her lifetime, the Chevalier was celebrated by
(03:39):
contemporary feminist thinkers like A. Lump de Gorge and Mary
wolf Stonecraft. In her vindication of the rights of women,
wolf Stonecraft specifically include Dion as an example of a
woman who was able to succeed in a man's world.
Wolf Stonecraft rights, I shall not lay any great stress
(04:00):
upon the example of a few women, sappho Eloisa, Mrs Macaulay,
the Empress of Russia, Madame Dion, et cetera. These and
many more, maybe reckoned exceptions and are not all heroes
as well as heroine's exceptions to general rules. I wish
to see women neither heroin nor brutes, but reasonable creatures who,
(04:23):
from having received a masculine education, have acquired courage and resolution.
The Chevalier's life would have been filled with intrigue and
scandal and more than a few international incidents, even if
she hadn't also been a walking example of this strange
performance of gender, both in the eighteenth century and today.
(04:46):
I'm Danis Schwartz and this is noble blood. The figure
who had come to be best known as the Chevalier
Dion was assigned male at birth when she was born
on October five, seventy eight into North France, a little
(05:09):
town tucked into the hills of the wine regions of Burgundy.
Her being assigned male delighted her father. They were a
noble family, but noble and poor, a terrible combination. Once
the Chevalier's father had a son his own air, he
was entitled to a certain inheritance from his in laws. Physically,
(05:32):
the Chevalier Deon remained small her entire life, five ft
and four inches tall, with long legs, blue eyes, and
a voice that was high pitched enough that it was
remarked upon presenting as a man as her father's. There,
Dion studied civil and canon law to become a lawyer
like her father. She graduated from College Mazzara at age
(05:55):
twenty one in seventeen forty nine. Over the next five years,
like many other young, intelligent literary people, Dion made a
name for herself as a political writer, one successful enough
that she even gained some notoriety. Her career was also
enough to propel her into a prominent job working as
(06:16):
a secretary for a number of high ranking court officials
and as an official royal censor for history and literature,
and then ultimately she got a job as the secretary
of the diplomat sent down behalf of France to the
court of the Russian Empress Elizabeth. Or at least that
(06:39):
was what Dion was doing in Russia officially. Unofficially, she
was working as an agent of the top secret spy
network known as the Secret of the King or Secrete
de Rouix. The group was so secret that there were
officials in the actual government who didn't know what existed.
(07:00):
The point of the Secrete de Rua was to serve
the King Louis fift exclusively so that he could operate
in certain foreign spears without involving France as a whole. Sometimes,
like in Russia, the task of the Secrete de Rua
ran contrary to the officially stated French diplomatic goals. The
(07:21):
king's plan, as Deon later recounted, it was to put
his cousin, the Prince de Conti, on the Polish throne
so that Poland could operate as a satellite French nation,
and so Deon was meant to make nice with embrass
Elizabeth of Russia, to help foster good relationships with her
and to undermine Habsburg power in the area. There's very
(07:43):
little corroborative documentation about Dion's time in Russia, possibly because
some of it was in a secret capacity, so for
some details we have to rely exclusively on her own,
possibly embellished memoirs written later in life. According to Dion,
at the time she was sent to Russia, the English
(08:04):
were attempting to restrict French access to the Russian court,
and so they were only allowing women and children across
the border. So in order to complete her mission, Dion
took on the disguise of a woman, a woman named
Lea de Beaumont, Dion passed as a woman and then
passed across the border. This is, according to Dion's memoirs,
(08:28):
the first instance of her publicly presenting as a woman
for political purposes in this case, but to ultimately positive effect.
It's also worth pointing out that Empress Elizabeth's court in
Russia was a place where cross dressing was a common
and delighted in form of entertainment. The Empress through weakly
(08:50):
cross dressing parties called metamorphosis balls, in which men arrived
in petticoats and Elizabeth herself showed off her figure in
men's riding oaths. As a young future Catherine the Great
would write of these parties, quote, the only woman who
looked really well and completely a man was the Empress herself,
(09:11):
As she was tall and powerful. Male attire suited her.
She had the handsomest leg I had ever seen. Some
people say Empress Elizabeth just wanted to throw these parties
because she was tired of hiding her handsomest leg underneath
voluminous women's petticoats. By all accounts, Dion dazzled in her post,
(09:34):
but she was ultimately withdrawn from Russia. When France was
pulled into a more immediate international conflict, the Seven Years
War with England, John was made a captain of dragoons
and fought valiantly, distinguishing herself enough that she was made
the secretary to the Duke of Vernay and was deployed
to London to assist in the drafting of the peace treaty.
(09:57):
When the war ended in seventeen sixty three, Dionu received
the Order of Salouis and was granted the title of Chevalier,
the French equivalent of a knighthood. She was only thirty
five years old, and she was going to continue to
be incredibly useful to the king. After the Seven Years War,
(10:23):
France was in fragile condition. It had been stripped of
its North American colonies, and it was saddled now with
two things, enormous debts and a hatred of the English.
The Secrete de Rouix had a new goal to see
if invading Britain was a thing that might be on
the horizon. Dion was given a post as a temporary
(10:46):
liaison to the English court, a short term diplomatic job,
while the real ambassador to England was being appointed secretly
on the orders of King Louis the fifteenth. Her job
was also to scope out the English coast line to
see if there was a place that would lend itself
to a French invasion. But our former good soldier Dion
(11:07):
wasted very little time becoming a thorn in the King's side.
She had expensive tastes, and she was formally reprimanded for
importing too much expensive wine on France's dying, which would
have been troublesome at any time, but was especially impudent
when France was cash strapped and deeply in debt from
(11:28):
the war. But Dion was about to cause more trouble
than just buying wine. Soon enough, the real official ambassador
to England was appointed, and Dion was politely told to
vacate the position. The official ambassador was a man named
Comte de Guerchi, who had almost no diplomatic experience and
(11:50):
even fewer friends. He was a mediocre bureaucrat, and as
soon as he arrived, Dion was to be demoted to
serve as his secretary, even though Dion outranked him as
a member of the secret In short, it was an
outrage not to be abided, and Dion said as much
in the numerous letters that she wrote back to France,
(12:13):
saying that it was an insult that she was expected
to vacate the ambassador position for someone as unqualified and
unlikable as the Comte. Later do All would also write
that she believed that she was being sabotaged back in
France by the King's favorite mistress, Madame de Pompadour, who
was threatened by anyone but her having prominent influence over
(12:35):
the King. Dion was fired for insolence and given two
weeks to pack her bags and come back to France.
At this point, she knew she was in trouble. Poor
low ranking nobleman could be thrown into the best deal
for less than what she did. She wouldn't be returning
back to France for a party with sparkling grape juice
(12:55):
in the office kitchen, and so de All made the
decision to just not. She just didn't return to France.
Louis was outraged, of course, and he demanded that Dion
be extradited, but the French Foreign Minister just shrugged and
said that Dion was welcome to stay in Britain as
(13:16):
a private citizen. The French crown went so far as
you tried to physically kidnap Dion and bring her back
to France, all to no avail. Without a country or
any real political protection, d a made an incredibly risky decision,
(13:37):
the nuclear option. She published a book of state secrets,
full of all of her correspondent through her service in
the secret Dubrois, with plenty of salacious details and the
promise that this was just the first volume of many,
that there were even more scandalous secrets on the way.
(13:58):
It was, like I said, a risky strategy. But when
that paid off. Without political protection, Dion turned to the
protection of celebrity and fame, the protective bubble of attention
and the adoration of the British people for this woman
who basically just betrayed the French government, Dion became an
(14:19):
overnight international celebrity, the person everyone was talking about the
next morning at the water cooler, so to speak. She
was the main character of European politics for fifteen minutes.
In Gary Cates's biography Monsieur Dion as a Woman, the
writer includes a contemporary letter from a sixteen year old
(14:41):
girl writing to a friend, astounded by Dion's impudence. As
for Dion's implicit blackmail to spell more French secrets, that
worked too, because she hadn't included the worst of King
Louis secrets. Louis the fifteen quietly awarded a lifelong pension
of twelve thousand livres in exchange for the promise that
(15:05):
she would withhold the most incriminating secrets, and maybe the
promise that she would continue to pass along some reports
on British politics as long as she was over in England.
Dion was in exile in an uneasy truce with the
(15:25):
French crown, but certainly not permitted to return to France,
and so she began her life in exile in England
as a political celebrity. It's also about now that the
rumors started, rumors that were possibly started but almost certainly
fueled by Dion herself, that that scandalous French expat who
(15:47):
had up until this point presented as a man, was
actually a woman. This is when the betting pool came about,
and the hordes of frenzied gamblers, desperate to examine Dion's
genitalia by assaulting her in the street. Dion, for her part,
kept coyly mum, continuing to present as a man until
finally an investigator arrived on behalf of the French government
(16:11):
trying to discover the truth. At this point, Dion sighed
and became clean. Yes, she actually was a woman. She
had been born a woman biologically, but was raised as
a son because her tyrannical father was desperate to have
an heir. In seventeen seventy seven, when Dion was forty
(16:33):
nine years old, the Court of the King's Bench made
its formal declaration on behalf of the English government from
Westminster that yes, the figure who had been known up
until that point as Monsieur Dion was actually a mademoiselle. Quote,
she who had called herself the Chevalier Dion until that day,
(16:55):
was an individual who did not possess with the Appalachian
man promist and that she was quote a virago disguised
in a uniform. It was actually all part of an
astonishingly clever roots on the part of Dion, as Hugh
Ryan wrote for the website Them Dots, By claiming that
(17:17):
she had secretly been a woman all along, disguised as
a man, Dion was allowed to publicly transition in a
way that never would have otherwise been socially acceptable. But
by framing it as coming clean, not only was her
transition acceptable, it was celebrated, met with absolutely no loss
(17:39):
of status. Here she was a good Christian woman who
could no longer live a lie, who had pretended to
be a man this entire time in noble service to
the French king. Now living as herself, Dion's goal was
to return to France as a heroine. A few years prior,
King Louis the fift died and his ransom Louis the sixteenth,
(18:01):
had taken the throne. Louis the sixteenth had no ambitions
to invade Britain, and he also did not see the
need for duel foreign services, and so the Secrete de
rule was abolished and Dion's pension along with it. It
took fourteen months of negotiation between Louis the sixteenth representative
and Dia to negotiate her return to France, but ultimately
(18:25):
the terms were settled with an agreement that came to
be known as the Transaction, which allowed Dion's return to France,
stipulating that she would henceforth present as a woman, though
she would still be allowed to wear the insignia of
the Order of San Louis. Her title was changed from
Chevalier to Chevalier, making her the first female knight, and
(18:49):
even though Dion wanted to continue to wear her dragoon uniform,
the king wouldn't allow it, and so the transaction also
provided funds for new outfits from Marie Antoinette's dressmaker, Rose Bertie.
On November one, Mademoiselle le Chevalier Deon emerged from a
(19:10):
four hour twilet in an elaborate dress with a powdered
wig and a face full of makeup to be formally
presented at Versailles. It was a rebirth of sorts. She
had returned to France, and she had returned as herself. Unfortunately,
(19:33):
Dion was about to learn a terrible lesson about what
it meant to be a woman in the seventeen hundreds,
In a word, boring. For an unmarried, relatively poor noble woman,
French court offered very little to do. There was sitting
around getting dressed, chatting, maybe playing cards for a woman
(19:58):
who had spent the earlier decades of her life traveling
the world as an international spy slash diplomat slash enfonte
reblay of the political world. Being a lady sitting around
in petticoats was mind numbing. When France joined the American
Colonies revolution against the English, Deon tried to put on
(20:19):
her dragoon uniform again and fight. She suggested that she
could assemble an all female battalion. The French government suggested
that she joined a convent. She was so insistent in
her ambitions to join the war efforts that ultimately Dion
was arrested and then imprisoned in the dungeon below the
(20:40):
Chateau of Dijon for nineteen days, upon which she was
released as long as she promised to shut up about
the whole wanting to go into battle thing. Disheartened, Dion
returned to England. She said it was just temporary to
settle some business, but it became fairly clear that she
had no intention of returning to France. At least in England,
(21:03):
she was able to escape some of the restrictions of
the highly rigid French court, and soon she would have
no choice but to stay in London. The French Revolution
broke out, and though Dion was safe in England, her
small pension was lost, as was all of her family
property Intinair. Now a woman in her sixties, Dion was impoverished,
(21:32):
forced to sell her possessions and her vast collection of
books to get by. Her main form of income was
dawning her full dress and participating in public fencing demonstrations
where she would best men, but her short career as
a fencing performer ended at age sixty eight with an injury.
(21:52):
At this point, for financial reasons, Dion was forced to
take a roommate, an old widow named Mrs Cole ms.
This Cole was the one who would go on to
discover Dion's dead body just a few years after Dion
was paralyzed from a fall the Chevalier. Dion died at
eighty one years old, impoverished, though Dion had spent the
(22:15):
last thirty three years of her life living as a woman,
Upon her death, Mrs Cole pulled back the bed sheets
to reveal that Dion had male genitalia, although it was
also noted that Dion had certain female sex characteristics. None
of that information feels very relevant or scientific to me,
(22:35):
but contemporary historians suggest that Dion might have been biologically intersex.
In the end, that feels far less important and far
less relevant to the realities of Dion's actual life, the
way she lived presenting as a man, which granted her
the access and opportunities of education, and then cleverly pretending
(22:57):
that she had been a cross dressing man her entire
her life, so that she could publicly transition and live
as a woman. The famous feminist Mary Wolstonecraft, thought of
as a woman on par with Sappho, and the famous
letter writer Eloise or Eloisa Dion both defied and defined
modern conventions of gender. It's a strange fallacy that people
(23:22):
assume trans people are a new phenomenon. The vocabulary might
be new, but presentations of gender throughout history are much
more varied and more nebulous than some people seem desperate
to keep believing. The Servali Deon became an international celebrity
presenting as a man, and then she did it again,
(23:44):
backwards and inhales. That's the story of the Chevalier Dion.
But continue listening after a brief sponsor break to hear
a little bit more about her legacy. A portrait of
(24:14):
the Chevalier d'on now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery
in London, featuring Dion with a full head of curls
and a gown and a hat with a tricolor ribbon,
meant to show her support for the French revolutionaries. The
announcement about the portraits, purchased back in twenty sixteen, is
wildly let's say, casual in its language, with the Guardian
(24:38):
mis gendering her and switching seemingly at random between pronouns.
At the end of her life, Dion was buried in
a private plot at Saint Pancras, although her grave was
lost when the church was constructed into a train station.
Maybe it's symbolically resonant. Her soul is in a place
of change and departure, where no one has to stay
(25:01):
in the same place for too long. Noble Blood is
a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild
from Aaron Monkey. The show is written and hosted by
Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams,
(25:21):
and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at
Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the
show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
M
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky Listener, Discretion is advised.
In seventeen seventy one, the London Stock Exchange introduced a
betting pool at three two odds that the notorious cultural
(00:24):
figure the Chevalier Dion, whose long resume onto that point
included stints as a diplomat, spy, soldier and political writer,
was biologically a woman. This was an actual betting pool
that people bet actual money on. The interest in the
Chevalier des Genitalia became so frenzied that for a period
(00:47):
of time John couldn't leave her home without armed guards
because of all the strangers who were trying to physically
rip her clothes off and expose whatever was beneath, presumably
to their financial advantage. After a year, the betting pool
was abandoned because no progress was made on actually coming
up with a determination that was deemed satisfactory. If you
(01:12):
can possibly believe it, Dion wasn't willing to undergo a
public physical examination. But Dion's gender expression became such a
topic of public interest in the eighteenth century that the
Court of the King's Bench in England, and then ultimately
the French government would weigh in to issue formal declarations
(01:33):
that she was in fact a woman and would and
should be publicly treated as such. The Chevalier Deon is
one of history's most compelling and confounding figures, sometimes regarded
as a proto queer figure, the namesake for a number
of groups that support the transgender community. She is sometimes
(01:56):
incorrectly recognized as the first openly transgender person in Europe,
but that declaration is both an oversimplification of the Chevalier
and a fundamental misunderstanding of gender expression. Throughout history, trans
people have existed as long as people have existed, and
(02:17):
certainly the Chevalier Dion would not have thought of herself
as transgender, nor would she have had the vocabulary to
do so so. Perhaps understandably, there's plenty of confusion and
a good amount of disagreement, even among prominent historians about
the appropriate pronouns to use when we're talking about the
(02:37):
Chevalier personally. With the research and reading I've done, I've
decided to use female pronouns continually throughout the episode. Just
as the London Stock Exchange discovered barring an inspection of
a now corpses genitals. There's no quote unquote right answer
(02:58):
for the chevalier biological sex, and to me, even thinking
along those terms is well a little gross and intrusive,
not to mention, as you'll find out later on, pretty
unhelpful in the end. So what we do actually know
about the Chevalier is that she spent the last three
(03:19):
and a half decades of her life making it very
clear on an official and on a personal level that
she was a woman and wanted to be treated as such.
It feels like the very least I can do as
a podcaster telling her story to take her at her
word there. During her lifetime, the Chevalier was celebrated by
(03:39):
contemporary feminist thinkers like A. Lump de Gorge and Mary
wolf Stonecraft. In her vindication of the rights of women,
wolf Stonecraft specifically include Dion as an example of a
woman who was able to succeed in a man's world.
Wolf Stonecraft rights, I shall not lay any great stress
(04:00):
upon the example of a few women, sappho Eloisa, Mrs Macaulay,
the Empress of Russia, Madame Dion, et cetera. These and
many more, maybe reckoned exceptions and are not all heroes
as well as heroine's exceptions to general rules. I wish
to see women neither heroin nor brutes, but reasonable creatures who,
(04:23):
from having received a masculine education, have acquired courage and resolution.
The Chevalier's life would have been filled with intrigue and
scandal and more than a few international incidents, even if
she hadn't also been a walking example of this strange
performance of gender, both in the eighteenth century and today.
(04:46):
I'm Danis Schwartz and this is noble blood. The figure
who had come to be best known as the Chevalier
Dion was assigned male at birth when she was born
on October five, seventy eight into North France, a little
(05:09):
town tucked into the hills of the wine regions of Burgundy.
Her being assigned male delighted her father. They were a
noble family, but noble and poor, a terrible combination. Once
the Chevalier's father had a son his own air, he
was entitled to a certain inheritance from his in laws. Physically,
(05:32):
the Chevalier Deon remained small her entire life, five ft
and four inches tall, with long legs, blue eyes, and
a voice that was high pitched enough that it was
remarked upon presenting as a man as her father's. There,
Dion studied civil and canon law to become a lawyer
like her father. She graduated from College Mazzara at age
(05:55):
twenty one in seventeen forty nine. Over the next five years,
like many other young, intelligent literary people, Dion made a
name for herself as a political writer, one successful enough
that she even gained some notoriety. Her career was also
enough to propel her into a prominent job working as
(06:16):
a secretary for a number of high ranking court officials
and as an official royal censor for history and literature,
and then ultimately she got a job as the secretary
of the diplomat sent down behalf of France to the
court of the Russian Empress Elizabeth. Or at least that
(06:39):
was what Dion was doing in Russia officially. Unofficially, she
was working as an agent of the top secret spy
network known as the Secret of the King or Secrete
de Rouix. The group was so secret that there were
officials in the actual government who didn't know what existed.
(07:00):
The point of the Secrete de Rua was to serve
the King Louis fift exclusively so that he could operate
in certain foreign spears without involving France as a whole. Sometimes,
like in Russia, the task of the Secrete de Rua
ran contrary to the officially stated French diplomatic goals. The
(07:21):
king's plan, as Deon later recounted, it was to put
his cousin, the Prince de Conti, on the Polish throne
so that Poland could operate as a satellite French nation,
and so Deon was meant to make nice with embrass
Elizabeth of Russia, to help foster good relationships with her
and to undermine Habsburg power in the area. There's very
(07:43):
little corroborative documentation about Dion's time in Russia, possibly because
some of it was in a secret capacity, so for
some details we have to rely exclusively on her own,
possibly embellished memoirs written later in life. According to Dion,
at the time she was sent to Russia, the English
(08:04):
were attempting to restrict French access to the Russian court,
and so they were only allowing women and children across
the border. So in order to complete her mission, Dion
took on the disguise of a woman, a woman named
Lea de Beaumont, Dion passed as a woman and then
passed across the border. This is, according to Dion's memoirs,
(08:28):
the first instance of her publicly presenting as a woman
for political purposes in this case, but to ultimately positive effect.
It's also worth pointing out that Empress Elizabeth's court in
Russia was a place where cross dressing was a common
and delighted in form of entertainment. The Empress through weakly
(08:50):
cross dressing parties called metamorphosis balls, in which men arrived
in petticoats and Elizabeth herself showed off her figure in
men's riding oaths. As a young future Catherine the Great
would write of these parties, quote, the only woman who
looked really well and completely a man was the Empress herself,
(09:11):
As she was tall and powerful. Male attire suited her.
She had the handsomest leg I had ever seen. Some
people say Empress Elizabeth just wanted to throw these parties
because she was tired of hiding her handsomest leg underneath
voluminous women's petticoats. By all accounts, Dion dazzled in her post,
(09:34):
but she was ultimately withdrawn from Russia. When France was
pulled into a more immediate international conflict, the Seven Years
War with England, John was made a captain of dragoons
and fought valiantly, distinguishing herself enough that she was made
the secretary to the Duke of Vernay and was deployed
to London to assist in the drafting of the peace treaty.
(09:57):
When the war ended in seventeen sixty three, Dionu received
the Order of Salouis and was granted the title of Chevalier,
the French equivalent of a knighthood. She was only thirty
five years old, and she was going to continue to
be incredibly useful to the king. After the Seven Years War,
(10:23):
France was in fragile condition. It had been stripped of
its North American colonies, and it was saddled now with
two things, enormous debts and a hatred of the English.
The Secrete de Rouix had a new goal to see
if invading Britain was a thing that might be on
the horizon. Dion was given a post as a temporary
(10:46):
liaison to the English court, a short term diplomatic job,
while the real ambassador to England was being appointed secretly
on the orders of King Louis the fifteenth. Her job
was also to scope out the English coast line to
see if there was a place that would lend itself
to a French invasion. But our former good soldier Dion
(11:07):
wasted very little time becoming a thorn in the King's side.
She had expensive tastes, and she was formally reprimanded for
importing too much expensive wine on France's dying, which would
have been troublesome at any time, but was especially impudent
when France was cash strapped and deeply in debt from
(11:28):
the war. But Dion was about to cause more trouble
than just buying wine. Soon enough, the real official ambassador
to England was appointed, and Dion was politely told to
vacate the position. The official ambassador was a man named
Comte de Guerchi, who had almost no diplomatic experience and
(11:50):
even fewer friends. He was a mediocre bureaucrat, and as
soon as he arrived, Dion was to be demoted to
serve as his secretary, even though Dion outranked him as
a member of the secret In short, it was an
outrage not to be abided, and Dion said as much
in the numerous letters that she wrote back to France,
(12:13):
saying that it was an insult that she was expected
to vacate the ambassador position for someone as unqualified and
unlikable as the Comte. Later do All would also write
that she believed that she was being sabotaged back in
France by the King's favorite mistress, Madame de Pompadour, who
was threatened by anyone but her having prominent influence over
(12:35):
the King. Dion was fired for insolence and given two
weeks to pack her bags and come back to France.
At this point, she knew she was in trouble. Poor
low ranking nobleman could be thrown into the best deal
for less than what she did. She wouldn't be returning
back to France for a party with sparkling grape juice
(12:55):
in the office kitchen, and so de All made the
decision to just not. She just didn't return to France.
Louis was outraged, of course, and he demanded that Dion
be extradited, but the French Foreign Minister just shrugged and
said that Dion was welcome to stay in Britain as
(13:16):
a private citizen. The French crown went so far as
you tried to physically kidnap Dion and bring her back
to France, all to no avail. Without a country or
any real political protection, d a made an incredibly risky decision,
(13:37):
the nuclear option. She published a book of state secrets,
full of all of her correspondent through her service in
the secret Dubrois, with plenty of salacious details and the
promise that this was just the first volume of many,
that there were even more scandalous secrets on the way.
(13:58):
It was, like I said, a risky strategy. But when
that paid off. Without political protection, Dion turned to the
protection of celebrity and fame, the protective bubble of attention
and the adoration of the British people for this woman
who basically just betrayed the French government, Dion became an
(14:19):
overnight international celebrity, the person everyone was talking about the
next morning at the water cooler, so to speak. She
was the main character of European politics for fifteen minutes.
In Gary Cates's biography Monsieur Dion as a Woman, the
writer includes a contemporary letter from a sixteen year old
(14:41):
girl writing to a friend, astounded by Dion's impudence. As
for Dion's implicit blackmail to spell more French secrets, that
worked too, because she hadn't included the worst of King
Louis secrets. Louis the fifteen quietly awarded a lifelong pension
of twelve thousand livres in exchange for the promise that
(15:05):
she would withhold the most incriminating secrets, and maybe the
promise that she would continue to pass along some reports
on British politics as long as she was over in England.
Dion was in exile in an uneasy truce with the
(15:25):
French crown, but certainly not permitted to return to France,
and so she began her life in exile in England
as a political celebrity. It's also about now that the
rumors started, rumors that were possibly started but almost certainly
fueled by Dion herself, that that scandalous French expat who
(15:47):
had up until this point presented as a man, was
actually a woman. This is when the betting pool came about,
and the hordes of frenzied gamblers, desperate to examine Dion's
genitalia by assaulting her in the street. Dion, for her part,
kept coyly mum, continuing to present as a man until
finally an investigator arrived on behalf of the French government
(16:11):
trying to discover the truth. At this point, Dion sighed
and became clean. Yes, she actually was a woman. She
had been born a woman biologically, but was raised as
a son because her tyrannical father was desperate to have
an heir. In seventeen seventy seven, when Dion was forty
(16:33):
nine years old, the Court of the King's Bench made
its formal declaration on behalf of the English government from
Westminster that yes, the figure who had been known up
until that point as Monsieur Dion was actually a mademoiselle. Quote,
she who had called herself the Chevalier Dion until that day,
(16:55):
was an individual who did not possess with the Appalachian
man promist and that she was quote a virago disguised
in a uniform. It was actually all part of an
astonishingly clever roots on the part of Dion, as Hugh
Ryan wrote for the website Them Dots, By claiming that
(17:17):
she had secretly been a woman all along, disguised as
a man, Dion was allowed to publicly transition in a
way that never would have otherwise been socially acceptable. But
by framing it as coming clean, not only was her
transition acceptable, it was celebrated, met with absolutely no loss
(17:39):
of status. Here she was a good Christian woman who
could no longer live a lie, who had pretended to
be a man this entire time in noble service to
the French king. Now living as herself, Dion's goal was
to return to France as a heroine. A few years prior,
King Louis the fift died and his ransom Louis the sixteenth,
(18:01):
had taken the throne. Louis the sixteenth had no ambitions
to invade Britain, and he also did not see the
need for duel foreign services, and so the Secrete de
rule was abolished and Dion's pension along with it. It
took fourteen months of negotiation between Louis the sixteenth representative
and Dia to negotiate her return to France, but ultimately
(18:25):
the terms were settled with an agreement that came to
be known as the Transaction, which allowed Dion's return to France,
stipulating that she would henceforth present as a woman, though
she would still be allowed to wear the insignia of
the Order of San Louis. Her title was changed from
Chevalier to Chevalier, making her the first female knight, and
(18:49):
even though Dion wanted to continue to wear her dragoon uniform,
the king wouldn't allow it, and so the transaction also
provided funds for new outfits from Marie Antoinette's dressmaker, Rose Bertie.
On November one, Mademoiselle le Chevalier Deon emerged from a
(19:10):
four hour twilet in an elaborate dress with a powdered
wig and a face full of makeup to be formally
presented at Versailles. It was a rebirth of sorts. She
had returned to France, and she had returned as herself. Unfortunately,
(19:33):
Dion was about to learn a terrible lesson about what
it meant to be a woman in the seventeen hundreds,
In a word, boring. For an unmarried, relatively poor noble woman,
French court offered very little to do. There was sitting
around getting dressed, chatting, maybe playing cards for a woman
(19:58):
who had spent the earlier decades of her life traveling
the world as an international spy slash diplomat slash enfonte
reblay of the political world. Being a lady sitting around
in petticoats was mind numbing. When France joined the American
Colonies revolution against the English, Deon tried to put on
(20:19):
her dragoon uniform again and fight. She suggested that she
could assemble an all female battalion. The French government suggested
that she joined a convent. She was so insistent in
her ambitions to join the war efforts that ultimately Dion
was arrested and then imprisoned in the dungeon below the
(20:40):
Chateau of Dijon for nineteen days, upon which she was
released as long as she promised to shut up about
the whole wanting to go into battle thing. Disheartened, Dion
returned to England. She said it was just temporary to
settle some business, but it became fairly clear that she
had no intention of returning to France. At least in England,
(21:03):
she was able to escape some of the restrictions of
the highly rigid French court, and soon she would have
no choice but to stay in London. The French Revolution
broke out, and though Dion was safe in England, her
small pension was lost, as was all of her family
property Intinair. Now a woman in her sixties, Dion was impoverished,
(21:32):
forced to sell her possessions and her vast collection of
books to get by. Her main form of income was
dawning her full dress and participating in public fencing demonstrations
where she would best men, but her short career as
a fencing performer ended at age sixty eight with an injury.
(21:52):
At this point, for financial reasons, Dion was forced to
take a roommate, an old widow named Mrs Cole ms.
This Cole was the one who would go on to
discover Dion's dead body just a few years after Dion
was paralyzed from a fall the Chevalier. Dion died at
eighty one years old, impoverished, though Dion had spent the
(22:15):
last thirty three years of her life living as a woman,
Upon her death, Mrs Cole pulled back the bed sheets
to reveal that Dion had male genitalia, although it was
also noted that Dion had certain female sex characteristics. None
of that information feels very relevant or scientific to me,
(22:35):
but contemporary historians suggest that Dion might have been biologically intersex.
In the end, that feels far less important and far
less relevant to the realities of Dion's actual life, the
way she lived presenting as a man, which granted her
the access and opportunities of education, and then cleverly pretending
(22:57):
that she had been a cross dressing man her entire
her life, so that she could publicly transition and live
as a woman. The famous feminist Mary Wolstonecraft, thought of
as a woman on par with Sappho, and the famous
letter writer Eloise or Eloisa Dion both defied and defined
modern conventions of gender. It's a strange fallacy that people
(23:22):
assume trans people are a new phenomenon. The vocabulary might
be new, but presentations of gender throughout history are much
more varied and more nebulous than some people seem desperate
to keep believing. The Servali Deon became an international celebrity
presenting as a man, and then she did it again,
(23:44):
backwards and inhales. That's the story of the Chevalier Dion.
But continue listening after a brief sponsor break to hear
a little bit more about her legacy. A portrait of
(24:14):
the Chevalier d'on now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery
in London, featuring Dion with a full head of curls
and a gown and a hat with a tricolor ribbon,
meant to show her support for the French revolutionaries. The
announcement about the portraits, purchased back in twenty sixteen, is
wildly let's say, casual in its language, with the Guardian
(24:38):
mis gendering her and switching seemingly at random between pronouns.
At the end of her life, Dion was buried in
a private plot at Saint Pancras, although her grave was
lost when the church was constructed into a train station.
Maybe it's symbolically resonant. Her soul is in a place
of change and departure, where no one has to stay
(25:01):
in the same place for too long. Noble Blood is
a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild
from Aaron Monkey. The show is written and hosted by
Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams,
(25:21):
and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at
Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the
show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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