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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.

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From Servant to Savant exposes the fundamental role that the French Revolution played in the emergence of modern professional musicianship and music historiography. Like other arts and trades in Old Regime Paris, music professionalized under a system regulated by legal permissions called privilèges. Musicians learned to work within the privilege system to elevate their legal and social status by the eve of Revolution. But the Revolution’s Abolition of Privilege on August 4, 1789, overthrew this feudal order and set in its place a modern property regime requiring strict delineation between public and private property. From Servant to Savant reveals the profound musical consequences of this reckoning. Before the Revolution, music was an activity that required permission, after, it was an object that could be possessed. Everyone seemingly hoped to gain something from owning music—musicians claimed it as their unalienable personal expression while the French nation sought to enhance imperial ambitions by appropriating it as the collective product of cultural heritage and national industry. Musicians capitalized on these changes to protect their professionalization within new laws and institutions yet excluded those without credentials from their elite echelon. As musicians and the government negotiated the place of music in a reimagined French society, new epistemic and professional practices constituted three lasting values of musical production: the composer’s sovereignty, the musical work’s inviolability, and the nation’s supremacy. From Servant to Savant thus demonstrates how the French Revolution set the stage for the emergence of so-called musical Romanticism and its legacies, which continue to haunt musical institutions and industries.