The œuvre of Jeanne Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, the public intellectual whose pedagogical journals and epistolary novels were routinely shelved in private eighteenth-century libraries alongside the works of the period's most famous philosophes, today remains virtually unknown. Beyond the scant available studies limited to her pedagogy and fairy tales, it is time to explore the theoretical aspects of those and other of her texts as significant alternatives to traditional Enlightenment discourse as epitomized in the contemporary philosophes.

Through her personal roles of governess to British and French aristocracy, editor of a French-language periodical featuring such contributors as Voltaire and Crraffigny, and author of internationally recognized pedagogical manuals, the most famous of which included her timeless version of “Beauty and the Beast,” Beaumont challenged a nascent female audience to actively participate in the intellectual discourse of their society, and used her real-world experience to develop a pedagogical methodology founded on the ideals of thought, debate, and action (“penser, parler, agir”). A Cartesian insistence on the separation of mind and body informed much of her argument in favor of women's intellectual capacity, and carried through to her discussion of such socio-political topics as women's equality, agrarian reform, religious tolerance, and social stratification. Not just a gatekeeper of information or a synthesizer of male-produced theories on education and other issues of social concern, she was rather an innovative thinker advancing active, personal commitment to public issues at all levels regardless of gender or social status. Also, promoting theories rooted in the mentoring of women by women as a means of personal realization, Beaumont further advanced French Enlightenment universalism through debate, reason, and action.