Chappell Roan stunned audiences with her fiery performance at the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs), in which she literally lit a castle to cinder while battling an army of knights. Some of us proclaimed “Roan of Arc” at the sight of Roan in her medieval chainmail ensemble, but others had alternative theories for who the sapphic pop star was referencing during her VMA debut: namely Julie d'Aubigny, a 15th-century bisexual French opera singer and master sword fighter who set a convent on fire to free her girlfriend.
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While Roan has not confirmed or denied the connection between her performance and Julie d'Aubigny, it's safe to say that the connection has left lesbians across the internet thinking: 1) A cross-dressing sword fighter would make a sick sapphic Halloween costume 2) Who is this diva? That’s why Them spoke to Kelly Gardiner, a historical fiction writer and author of Goddess, a novel based on the rise and fall of d'Aubigny, who has extensively studied her, to tell us more about the opera singer’s life and legacy.
“I don't pretend to know what was in Chappell Roan's mind or heart, but if I wanted to reimagine the historical lineage of warrior women wanting to burn it all down, I can't think of a better way,” Gardiner tells Them. “She was wild, in so many ways, and will never not be fascinating to me, and to the many people around the world — especially queer people — who admire her.”
Much of her life is shrouded in mystery as a consequence of poor historical record-keeping from the 1600s, but here’s what we do know.
Born around 1673, d'Aubigny was the daughter of a secretary to King Louis XIV’s Master of Horse, French nobleman Count d’Armagnac. Unlike many women born into noble families of the time, d’Aubigny learned to sword fight from a young age and was educated by her father, an accomplished swordsman, alongside her brothers in Versaille, fencing and cross-dressing publicly in boy’s clothing from a young age.
Unfortunately, as was the groomy norm for teenage girls at the time, she was the mistress of d’Armagnac, a transactional agreement that was common at the time that exchanged financial support for companionship and sex, and was later married off to another older nobleman, Sieur de Maupin, though he was sent far away to a province of France soon after their union. She ran away from d’Armagnac’s abuse to pursue an affair with a prominent swordsman in the royal court, Sérannes, eventually running away from Versaille with him. During her teen years, her fencing prowess only deepened as she traveled around France giving fencing demonstrations with Sérannes to make ends meet. She actually got so good that during one duel people didn’t believe she was a woman because d'Aubigny was so skilled, so she took her shirt off to prove it to the audience.
Many stories told about d'Aubigny are whimsical firsthand accounts that have grown fuzzy over the years, like a mythology. She began supplementing her fencing earnings by performing as an opera singer for the Marseille Opéra where she met and fell in love with an unnamed young woman. After the woman’s family sent her away to a convent in Avignon, d'Aubigny came to rescue her. The historical details here are fuzzy, but it’s commonly said that the young swordswoman entered the convent after an elderly nun died and released her lover. The two then put the dead nun in her lover’s cell and burned the convent to the ground as they fled. Gardiner says that while it’s easy to look retrospectively at the story as a historical win for queers, it's important to remember the actual teens behind it.
“It's hard to beat the story of the convent burning and nun elopement for drama, but when I really thought about that, it seemed very sad,” Gardiner says. “Two young women with no options take extreme action to escape, on the run for weeks with no money and no home, and eventually are forced apart and punished. It's a great story, but a tragedy, not a thrilling adventure.”
The couple was on the run for three months, in which d'Aubigny was sentenced to death in absentia by the parliament of Provence under the presumption she was a man. (Because why would a woman abduct another woman?) Eventually, d'Aubigny returned her girlfriend to her family and continued onward by cross-dressing in men's clothing through France. In an incredibly homoerotic start to a relationship, while cross-dressing, she duelled a nobleman Comte d’Albert and wounded him. But after she revealed she was a woman and nursed him back to health, they fell in love and had a long-standing friendship for years after their relationship ended.
The rest of her short life was equally action-packed: she became one of the stars of the Paris Opéra by the age of 17, was pardoned by the King of her crimes of kidnapping and burning down a convent, and fell madly in love with the most beautiful woman in France, Madame la Marquise de Florensac. It’s actually reported that d'Aubigny and the well-connected socialite lived together for two years (not in a roommate way) until de Florensac died of a fever in 1705. It’s at this time that d'Aubigny joined a convent in mourning and retired from opera forever, dying at the age of 33.
While her life was short and at times tragic, d'Aubigny embodied the subtle queer rebellion that existed even in 15th century France and is one of history’s most regal bisexual icons.
“She is absolutely a queer icon in ways she could never have imagined,” Gardiner says. “We need to be wary of projecting our modern ideas of identity onto people from the past, but we absolutely know she had women and men as lovers and wore men's clothes in the streets, so she was living a queer life, even if she didn't define it that way.”
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