Jeanne Campan

Jeanne Campan was appointed first lady of the bedchamber to Marie Antoinette in 1770. That career came to an end with the French Revolution, but by 1794 she had established a boarding school for girls at Saint-Germain. The school’s success led to an appointment by Napoleon to direct the Imperial Academy of Écouen, which educated female relatives of officers of the Legion of Honor. Assuming the post in 1807, Campan supervised a curriculum of female domestic arts. Her own writings, published posthumously, include Mémoires sur la vie privée de Marie Antoinette (Memoirs of Marie Antoinette, 1823), and L’éducation des femmes (The Education of Women, 1823).