Author, envoy, soldier, spy, the Chevalière Deon (1728-1810) crossed boundaries of gender and nation, moving between Britain and France, and male and female. For thirty years, in peace and in war, the Chevalière served the French crown as censor, secret agent, dragoon officer and diplomat - presenting as a man. After her "conversion" (her term) she spent the following thirty years as a celebrity, famed for giving virtuoso displays of swordswomanship wearing her signature black dress. Londoners referred to her as "the wonder of her sex", and took pride in having provided Deon with a refuge at a time when she faced the menace of kidnap and incarceration in the Bastille at the hands of King Louis XV's agents.
Beginning in the 1770s Deon began drafting and redrafting a series of life writings in a range of genres. Some took the form of legal depositions, others memoir, still others adopted more dramatic form, built around dialogues with notable men and women of her age (some of these were individuals Deon had met in person, while others were figures she had not had any contact with). A short autobiography appeared in 1779, but otherwise none of these texts appeared in print during Deon's lifetime - despite Deon securing advances from at least two London publishers eager to help her tell her story. An edition of a few of these texts was published in English translation in 2001.
Deon did, however, commission portrait engravings and mezzotints depicting herself in both male and female costume, as well as in the character of Pallas Athene. And, of course, contemporary observers on both sides of the Channel produced their own texts and images of her. Many of these cannot easily be characterized as either celebratory or satirical. Others were highly invasive of Deon's privacy.
Historians of trans are usually reliant on the texts produced by such self-described cis male "experts" (surgeons such as those who examined Deon's body, sexologists such as Havelock Ellis), often for want of texts and images produced by their subjects themselves. It is certainly possible to read such sources against the grain, and recover something of the trans experience. Deon's case is unusual in that we have hundreds of pages of unpublished life writings, as well as diaries that record what Deon did, day by day, for more than forty years of her life. Deon was also a prolific libelliste and author, publishing a thirteen-volume set of Les Loisirs du Chevalier D'Eon. Hers was a highly curated self, and this curation included writing herself into a history of femmes fortes ("strong women"). Deon strongly identified with Joan of Arc, the Amazons and medieval saints who had "disguised their sex in the service of God". Deon could be seen as both trans and as a historian of trans avant la lettre.
I first began working on Deon in 2001, exploring her relationship with her friend John Wilkes, a radical politician and journalist whose rhetoric and career were in some ways analogous (contemporaries certainly spotted the resemblances). I published this research in the English Historical Review in 2003. Along with Simon Burrows and a team from the University of Leeds (where much of Deon's archive is held), I then co-edited a 2007 volume entitled The Chevalier D'Eon and His Worlds.
As the title we chose indicates, our understanding of Deon has evolved. In my forthcoming biography I will be using the pronoun she/her when addressing the period after Deon's "conversion". When addressing the earlier years, I will not be using any gendered pronouns. I refer to her as Deon rather than D'Eon as that is the form her family used, and which Deon herself used for much of her life.
Deon presents remarkable opportunities and challenges to any would-be biographer, and I welcome opportunities to discuss these with members of the trans community, its allies as well as with museum curators and others active in the public history space. If you would like to be part of this conversation, please email me. To see some of the things I've found so far, check out my Instagram, DeonTraces.
