, known as (24 June 1772 – 7 January 1830), was a Savoyard aristocrat. During the French Revolution, she became a popular hostess in Paris, and modelled for Jacques-Louis David's 1799 painting The Intervention of the Sabine Women.
Married to an officer in the Sardinian army, de Bellegarde fled Savoy at the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792, but returned at the end of the year to protect her family property from confiscation. She became the lover of Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles, and accompanied him to Paris in 1793. After de Séchelles' arrest and execution, she was in turn arrested and imprisoned in the Saint-Lazare prison, where she met Aimée de Coigny, a prominent . Released after the fall of Maximilien Robespierre in July 1793, de Bellegarde became a fixture of culture and established relationships with many leading figures of the period, including Talleyrand, Thérésa Tallien and Rouget de Lisle.
De Bellegarde's role in the creation of The Intervention of the Sabine Women has been described as part of the painting's "legend". It provoked numerous, often contradictory, Parisian stories and rumours, which often revolved around de Bellegarde's status as a sex symbol. Her involvement, along with that of her sister Aurore, was considered a significant influence on Parisian cultural tastes, and has been discussed at length in later scholarship on the painting.
She maintained her during the French Empire, where she became known as a royalist and an opponent of Napoleon, and during the Bourbon Restoration. In later life, she became known for her religious and charitable activity in the town of Chenoise, where she owned a château. She died in Paris on 7 January 1830.
De Bellegarde and her sister Aurore were known as . The art historian Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has written that the sisters were "known to epitomise the whole world of fashionable femininity under the Directoire."
Early life and family
was born on 24 June 1772 in Chambéry, the former capital of the Duchy of Savoy and its largest city on the French side of the Alps.
Adèle was the elder daughter of , and a general in the army of the Dutch Estates. Her mother, , was a Picard noblewoman and sister of the French general Louis Charles d'Hervilly. The family were one of the oldest in Savoy: since 1530, they had owned the , a castle constructed in 1342 on the border between Savoy and Dauphiné. The family divided their time between the castle and an hôtel particulier at 1 in Chambéry. Her sister was born on 30 September 1774, while her mother died giving birth to her youngest sister, (known as ), on 3 July 1776.
On 5 November 1787, de Bellegarde was married to , the son of her father's brother Jean-François de Bellegarde and a frequent visitor to the family home. Friedrich, a freemason, a native of Saxony and a captain in the Sardinian army, was thirty-five; she was fifteen. The couple had two children — a daughter and a son — between 1787 and 1791. Her father died early in 1790, leaving Adèle the title of , while died in May 1792 at the age of eighteen.
French invasion of Savoy (1792)
After the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789, tensions grew between France and its monarchical neighbours, including the Kingdom of Sardinia, of which Savoy was a part, largely over the mutual hostility between revolutionary and monarchical ideals, the perceived threat to the revolutionary state from émigré aristocrats, and European monarchs' concern for the safety and rule of Louis XVI. Riots broke out across Savoy, including in Chambéry, prompted by unrest at the French abolition of seigneurial dues (which prompted calls among the rural population for the same) and at rising prices, partly caused by the immigration of wealthy French aristocrats. Little is known of de Bellegarde during this period: Vermale suggests that she and her husband may have sheltered some of the numerous French émigrés who fled across the border to Savoy.
On 20 April 1792, the French National Assembly voted for war with Austria and France invaded the Austrian Netherlands, beginning the War of the First Coalition. In August, news reached Savoy that the French armies were preparing an invasion. Friedrich de Bellegarde, now a lieutenant-colonel in Sardinian service, was given command of the area around Chambéry, while the was fortified, garrisoned and equipped with cannon. The château was made the headquarters of the Sardinian forces, commanded by General de Lazary.
In early September, Friedrich ordered Adèle and Aurore to leave for Piedmont, to which most of the Savoyard nobility not involved in the military preparation were already in the process of evacuating. According to the de Bellegardes' biographer Ernest Daudet, the sisters were reluctant to leave, as they had been hopefully expecting a French victory. Their friend Aimée de Coigny later wrote that they had been "" ("happy to become Frenchwomen").
The Kingdom of Sardinia declared war on revolutionary France on 21 September 1792, the day after the French victory at the Battle of Valmy. On the night of 21–22 September, French troops under the Marquis de Montesquiou, led by a unit of Savoyard expatriates known as the , entered Savoy, which was abandoned without resistance by the Sardinian army. By 4 October, the French were in total control: the advancing Montesquiou wrote from Chambéry that "the cockade is displayed everywhere",Quoted in and modern historians have noted the apparent enthusiasm of the Savoyard public for annexation by France.
The administration of Savoy passed to a hastily gathered popular assembly known as the National Assembly of the Allobroges, which issued a decree in October threatening to confiscate the property of those exiles who did not return by 26 December. Friedrich, who was still in the Sardinian army, agreed with Adèle and Aurore that the women would return to Savoy, leaving their children with him in Piedmont. Savoy was annexed to France on 27 November: the two sisters had returned to Chambéry by 1 December, when they registered their return with the municipal government. When asked about her husband, de Bellegarde claimed to know neither his whereabouts nor his intentions, and to have no responsibility for his absence. The sisters regained both the and the family's in Chambéry, and made them available to revolutionary "Popular Societies".
Revolutionary Savoy (1792–1793) Following the annexation of Savoy, the National Assembly sent a delegation of four commissioners to organise the new administrative , which would be centred upon Chambéry. The commissioners were Hérault de Séchelles, Grégoire Jagot, Henri Grégoire and Philibert Simond, a native of the region. The delegates arrived on 14 December alongside the general François Christophe de Kellermann, who replaced Montesquiou as commander of the French Army of the Alps and established his headquarters in Chambéry. The de Bellegardes hosted the commissioners in the , and they were subsequently given apartments in the family's .
Throughout late 1792 and into 1793, revolutionary violence increased across France, leading into what became known as "The Reign of Terror". Louis XVI was executed on 23 January 1793; in the remainder of France, at least fifty Savoyards were executed, while others were killed in the region, which ordered — but does not appear to have used — a guillotine from Paris. De Bellegarde and de Séchelles became lovers during this period, and rumours arose in Chambéry that the sixteen-year-old Aurore had likewise begun a relationship with Simond — a defrocked priest who, at thirty-eight, was more than twice her age — which attached to her the unflattering nickname of "the Simonette". The lavish hospitality shown by the sisters to their guests was also a source of intrigue: the de Bellegardes organised parties in honour of the delegates, and Kellerman is said to have boastfully remarked, after a stay at the château, that "" ("their hospitality was as complete as could be"). The sisters' influence with the commissioners has been credited with protecting several Savoyard aristocrats from execution, and securing their release from prison.
The de Bellegarde sisters, perhaps aware of the dangers of being labelled as "aristocrats", hosted parties and gatherings for revolutionary leaders in both their and at their château. They took to wearing sans-culotte clothing and kept company with a revolutionary known as "Princess Pistol". On 18 May 1793, de Séchelles and Simond, whose zealous application of revolutionary law had made them widely despised in Savoy, left for Paris, accompanied by Adèle and Aurore. Adèle's husband, Friedrich, was stationed in command of a grenadier regiment at the Little St Bernard Pass: his fellow officer, the marquis Henry-Joseph Costa, informed Friedrich of the news, which he had heard from his own wife living near Chambéry. This was the first that Friedrich had heard of his wife since March, when Adèle's letters had ceased. According to Costa's great-grandson, Charles-Albert, de Bellegarde was heartened to learn that she was not dead, "but would have preferred that his wife were somewhere other than Paris." Whether Costa informed de Bellegarde of his wife's infidelity is unknown.
Paris: The Reign of Terror (1793–1794)
The journey from Chambéry to Paris took about a week. De Séchelles moved into the house of his grandmother, Hélène Moreau de Séchelles, on the . It is possible that de Bellegarde moved in with him, at least initially, though Merlin states that she rented an apartment. The de Bellegarde sisters lived openly and took an active part in Parisian society: de Coigny later wrote "" ("their pretty appearance and their youth were pleasing to everyone's eyes"). Around 1793, de Bellegarde held a fashionable in Paris. At some point in the same year, they purchased a château in Chenoise, which had previously been the home of their mother's family but had been confiscated after their uncle, Louis Charles d'Hervilly, fled France as an émigré.
The sisters became closely acquainted with the aristocrat and artist , then known as "citizen Brûlart", and other members of Parisian high society. By October, they were living in a house with de Valence. The three women also formed a close friendship with Rouget de Lisle, the composer of La Marseillaise, with whom they dined frequently and to whom Adèle wrote several letters. De Bellegarde maintained her correspondence with de Lisle after he was arrested for his royalist sympathies and imprisoned in 1793. (de Bellegarde's correspondence after de Lisle's arrest); (de Lisle's royalism) On the day of his arrest, de Lisle wrote to de Bellegarde, seeking her help in persuading de Séchelles — whom de Lisle believed had ordered it — to have him set free; she wrote back that he could not help, but attempted to assure de Lisle that de Séchelles had played no part in the matter. De Valence was also arrested and imprisoned, probably in February or March 1794.