Fanny de Beauharnais (1737–1813)

Marie-Anne-Françoise Mouchard de Chaban began writing poetry as a child and published under the pen name Fanny de Beauharnais. She was born in Paris to a family of French financiers from La Rochelle. She was two years old at the death of her mother, Anne Louise Lazure, and her father, François Abraham Marie Mouchard, a royal Receiver-General of Finances, sent her to be raised in a convent for aristocratic girls. In 1753, at age 15, she was married to comte Claude de Beauharnais, 20 years her senior, and became the aunt by marriage of the future Empress Josephine. She later served as the godmother of Josephine's daughter Hortense de Beauharnais (future queen of Holland). The marriage was unhappy and the couple separated in 1762. Fanny de Beauharnais was renowned for her beauty, her social graces, and her love of literature. Her first published work, a two-volume collection of poems and prose, appeared in 1772. She became one of the pillars of the Almanach des Muses, the French-language poetry magazine, and also wrote philosophical tales (contes philosophiques). During the French Revolution, she was briefly imprisoned and then fled to Italy. On her return, she lived in the rue de Tournon in Paris and devoted herself to her writing and her famous literary salon, which attracted many other writers and playwrights -- as well as Thomas Jefferson, then serving as the USA's Ambassador to France. She was a champion of women writers and an early feminist. Fanny's granddaughter Stéphanie de Beauharnais became Grand Duchess of Baden, and through her, Fanny was an ancestor of the royal families of Belgium, Luxembourg, and Monaco.