The Original Blogger: Sheryle Bagwell on Madame de Sévigné
- Sheryle Bagwell
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Read an article penned by Sheryle Bagwell, author of Letter from Provence on Madame de Sévigné.
New media has finally vanquished the old. Bloggers, influencers, content creators and podcasters now occupy front row seats in the White House briefing room once reserved for The New York Times and The Washington Post. With one keystroke, a YouTuber can reach more eyeballs than Woodward and Bernstein ever did. But just how new is the new media?
I’d argue, not that new at all. Indeed, my vote for ‘original blogger’ goes to a French noblewoman by the name of Madame de Sévigné who was practising the craft of social media way back in the seventeenth century. Before blogs and Substack, before Instagram and email—even before newspapers—there were letters. And Madame de Sévigné was the queen of letter writers.
She wrote hundreds of them during her lifetime—witty, sharp, even gossipy letters, which she sent mostly to her beloved daughter who had moved from Paris to far-flung Provence. Madame de Sévigné was an early adopter of a new invention called a national postal service. Suddenly men on horseback could deliver letters to the other side of the country in days—Imagine! —and she was determined to make the most of it.
With her letters, Madame de Sévigné opened a door to a world that was closed to most at the time—the glittering court of Louis XIV during the 1600s. She sent lengthy reports to her daughter from Versailles, where she hovered on the margins. She wrote about the King’s latest mistress (‘quite flat in the rear end’) and of attending a play by Racine in the Royal presence (‘we listened to the tragedy with an attentiveness that was noticed’). Her letters were strewn with bon mots and strong opinions. She once advised a friend, when trapped at the homes of boring acquaintances, to ‘take chocolate that the most unpleasant company seems good to you’. Marriage, she wrote, was ‘a dangerous disorder; I had rather drink’.
So entertaining and informative were Madame de Sévigné’s letters that her daughter would often read them out loud to her friends and pass them around to family members. Knowing this, Madame de Sévigné, like a true blogger, would often write them as little performances, even suggesting the tone in which they should be read. Newspapers, which were just emerging, wrote of war and religion, but Madame de Sévigné’s letters spoke of love, and life, and doctors who failed to cure her rheumatism. After her death, her letters would be published to much acclaim; down the centuries they were read by the likes of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf who called her a ‘genius of the art of speech’.
So, the next time you admire the brilliance of an acerbic 150-word tweet, remember the long path of history which got us here. Madame de Sévigné, wielding her quill and a piece of parchment, did it all before.
Sheryle Bagwell’s new memoir Letter from Provence, in which Madame de Sévigné features prominently, will be published by Allen & Unwin in March 2026.
Letter from Provence
by Sheryle Bagwell
Australian journalist Sheryle Bagwell's move to Provence is enlivened by the discovery of a book of seventeenth-century letters.
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