Music as Feminine Capital in Napoleonic France: Nancy Macdonald’s Musical Upbringing

This microhistory situates the musical activities of Nancy Macdonald, a French student at Madame Campan’s National Institute for Young Women and Napoleon Bonaparte’s school for daughters of Legion of Honour Recipients, in broader discourses about women and music in Napoleonic France. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of capital, it eschews a simplistic assessment of music as either constraining or liberating young women, by arguing instead that performance operated as a kind of ‘feminine capital’, accrued and then circulated to achieve tangible socio-economic ends. A feminine-capital framework exposes the paradoxes inherent in female music-making and reveals how values about music were enculturated from girlhood to womanhood in France. This approach contributes to recent scholarship that challenges the rigid binaries previously defining women’s musical labour during the Classical era and inserts France into historiographies of women’s musical practices in the early nineteenth century.