The most important religious structure in Dreux was the now-destroyed collegial
church of Saint-Étienne, a royal foundation within the precincts of the château. The
church, begun in the 1130s, was intended as the burial church of the counts. Several
historiated and foliate capitals from the church have been identified; two are in the local
museum, a fragment is at Yale, and several others are either embedded in the repaired
château walls or reinstalled in the burial crypt of the Orléans family mausoleum built on
the site in the early 19th century. The château is known from early views and from the
extensive surviving walls, although no trace of the donjon or other structures remains.
R.Thomas McDonald/William W.Clark
Cahn, Walter. “A King from Dreux.” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 34(1974):14–29.
Châtelain, André. Châteaux forts et féodalité en l’Île-de-France du XIe au XIIIe siècle. Nonette:
Créer, 1983, pp. 351–53.
Gardner, Stephen. “The Church of Saint-Étienne in Dreux and Its Role in the Formulation of Early
Gothic Architecture.” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 137(1984): 86–113.
Lelièvre, Jean. L’église Saint-Pierre de Dreux. Dreux, 1952.
DROIT DU SEIGNEUR
. A symbol of abusive or aristocratic domination, the droit du seigneur, or ius primae
noctis, was a custom once thought to have characterized the Middle Ages, whereby a lord
might claim sexual relations with the bride of a servile tenant on her wedding night.
There is no evidence that any legally recognized exaction of this sort ever existed. Karl
Schmidt attempted to prove that all reports of a droit du seigneur are to be traced either to
pure invention or misinterpretation of marriage taxes. There are, however, some
references to a seigneurial abuse (rather than the right) of newly married women in the
regions of the Pyrénées. Peasants in Catalonia agitating for an end to serfdom in 1462
complained of this practice and the king of Aragon abolished it, along with other more
widely acknowledged servile incidents, in 1486. There is also indication that the same
oppressive custom was practiced in Béarn and Bigorre during the 16th century.
In the 18th century, the droit du seigneur was denounced in the antifeudal writings of
Voltaire, Restif de la Bretonne, and above all by Beaumarchais, in his Mariage de
Figaro. Controversy erupted during the mid-19th century, when some asserted that most
Frenchmen were the descendants of bastards because of the earlier prevalence of the droit
du seigneur. The abusive right has appeared frequently in what might charitably be called
romantic historical fiction. The historical core of this essentially literary and polemical
theme is small but not completely fabricated.
Paul H.Freedman
Barthélemy, Anatole de. “Le droit du seigneur.” Revue des questions historiques 1(1866):95–123.
Bascle de Lagrèze, Gustave. Histoire du droit dans les Pyrénées (Comté de Bigorre). Paris:
Imprimerie Impériale, 1876.
Hinojosa y Naveros, Eduardo de.“¿Existio en Cataluña el ‘ius primae noctis?” Annales
internationales d’histoire 2(1902): 224–26.
Litvack, Frances Eleanor Palermo. Le droit du seigneur in European and American Literature.
Birmingham: Summa, 1984.
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