The Betrayal of the Duchess: The Scandal That Unmade the Bourbon Monarchy and Made France Modern

by Maurice Samuels

Overview

Fighting to reclaim the French crown for the Bourbons, the duchesse de Berry faces betrayal at the hands of one of her closest advisors in this dramatic history of power and revolution.

The year was 1832, a cholera pandemic raged, and the French royal family was in exile, driven out by yet another revolution. From a drafty Scottish castle, the duchesse de Berry — the mother of the eleven-year-old heir to the throne — hatched a plot to restore the Bourbon dynasty. For months, she commanded a guerilla army and evaded capture by disguising herself as a man. But soon she was betrayed by her trusted advisor, Simon Deutz, the son of France's Chief Rabbi. The betrayal became a cause célèbre for Bourbon loyalists and ignited a firestorm of hate against France's Jews. By blaming an entire people for the actions of a single man, the duchess's supporters set the terms for the century of antisemitism that followed.

Brimming with intrigue and lush detail, The Betrayal of the Duchess is the riveting story of a high-spirited woman, the charming but volatile young man who double-crossed her, and the birth of one of the modern world's most deadly forms of hatred.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541645455
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	04/14/2020
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	258,033
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.70(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Maurice Samuels is the Betty Jane Anlyan professor of French at Yale University, chair of the program in Judaic studies, and founder and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism. He is the author of three books, including The Spectacular Past, which won the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize, and Inventing the Israelite, which received the MLA's Scaglione Prize. Prior to teaching at Yale, he was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania after completing his PhD at Harvard. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015. He lives in New York and New Haven, Connecticut.

Table of Contents

Bourbon Family Tree x-xi

Map of the Vendee xii-xiii

Introduction 1

Part 1 The Duchess

Chapter 1 The Volcano's Edge 9

Chapter 2 A Parisian Education 27

Part 2 The Convert

Chapter 3 A Modern Jew 49

Chapter 4 Apostasy 67

Part 3 The Campaign

Chapter 5 Exile 91

Chapter 6 The Meeting 107

Chapter 7 The Tightrope Walker 129

Chapter 8 Civil War 145

Part 4 The Arrest

Chapter 9 Hiding 169

Chapter 10 The Search 189

Chapter 11 Into the Fire 211

Part 5 The Scandal

Chapter 12 Surrender 231

Chapter 13 The Illustrious Captive 249

Chapter 14 A Second Judas 273

Chapter 15 Aftershocks 293

Coda Memory 315

Acknowledgments 325

Image Credits 329

A Note on Sources 331

Notes 335

Index 383

Editorial Reviews

02/24/2020

Samuels (The Right to Difference), a professor of French at Yale University, delivers a colorful history of the duchesse de Berry’s failed attempt to restore the Bourbon dynasty to the French throne in 1832. Arguing that the duchess’s betrayal by her adviser, Simon Deutz, “helped make antisemitism a key feature of right-wing ideology in France,” Samuels details her childhood among exiled royals in Sicily, her arranged marriage to the nephew of King Louis XVIII, her husband’s assassination, and the birth of her son, Henri, the only male heir to the Bourbon monarchy. When Louis-Philippe d’Orléans seized power in the Revolution of 1830, the duchess went into exile in Scotland. She later snuck back into France dressed as a peasant boy and rallied support for a “legitimist” rebellion to place her on the throne as regent until Henri came of age. Deutz, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, received 500,000 francs after revealing her location to the authorities, and the duchess was imprisoned before returning to Italy. She became a hero for “all those who saw themselves as victims of modernity,” according to Samuels, while Deutz was villified with racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic stereotypes. The wealth of historical details sometimes slows the narrative, but Samuels delivers a spirited and comprehensive account of this lesser-known drama and draws insightful parallels to anti-Semitism within modern-day reactionary movements. Armchair historians will be delighted. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"The Duchess of Berry's story is enthralling, and Mr. Samuels tells it well. His epigraph is taken from the Memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne: 'A new Walter Scott will have a difficult time finding a more poetic subject than the expedition of Madame la duchesse de Berry.' Absolutely."—Wall Street Journal


"A suspenseful, entertaining narrative that provides vivid portraits of its two subjects.... Samuels has stripped away the pious propaganda, uncovered many new details, and told the story in a gripping fashion that also brings out its absurdities and moments of dark comedy."—New York Review of Books


"Maurice Samuels's account of the improbable and riveting story of the duchess de Berry is both deeply researched and elegantly written. But this triumphant work provides much more than a narrative of civil war and treachery; it also interweaves dazzling insight into deeply relevant issues including the genesis of French (and European) antisemitism."—Andrew S. Curran, author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely

"The duchesse de Berry raises an army to restore the Bourbon monarchy. Her advisor, a charming Jewish convert named Simon Deutz, sells her out to the government, and her plot fails. A flood of literature follows — from Hugo, Chateaubriand, Dumas. And then, mysteriously, the Deutz affair disappears from modern memory. It took someone with Maurice Samuels's psychological and political insights, his astonishing research, and his gift for story telling, to bring to life the true origin story of modern anti-Semitism, sixty years before the Dreyfus affair. A thriller, a non-fiction novel of palace intrigue, full of outrageous characters and theatrical scenes, Samuels's The Betrayal of the Duchess speaks of passions and prejudices uncannily suited to our own times."—Alice Kaplan, author of Looking for The Stranger and Dreaming in French and the John M. Musser Professor of French, Yale University


"This timely history — impeccably researched and engagingly told — relates the failed royalist coup of the Bourbon princess Caroline, duchesse de Berry. Highlighting the involvement of her Jewish-turned-Catholic co-conspirator, Simon Deutz, Maurice Samuels shows how this episode crystallized an ideology of antisemitism that has pervaded French society, with disastrous results, ever since."—Caroline Weber, author of Proust's Duchess and Queen of Fashion


"With a knack for narration and deep knowledge of the times, Maurice Samuels excavates a scandal of lost causes and the new hatreds that grow in their place. It is at once a gripping account of individuals, a portrait of an age, and a history that speaks to us, hauntingly, in our own troubled present."—Darrin M. McMahon, author Divine Fury and Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of History, Dartmouth College


"A colorful history of the duchesse de Berry's failed attempt to restore the Bourbon dynasty to the French throne... Samuels delivers a spirited and comprehensive account of this lesser-known drama and draws insightful parallels to anti-Semitism within modern-day reactionary movements. Armchair historians will be delighted."—Publishers Weekly


"Treachery, disguise, capture, and imprisonment-the scandal surrounding an ill-fated 19th-century French insurrection-is all the more captivating in this factual retelling... Recommended for readers of Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and 19th-century French history and literature."—Library Journal


"The Betrayal of the Duchess is excellent in every respect... [Samuels] is a talented storyteller, one who eschews the too-often heavy prose of academics writing for and to themselves...Samuels has also brushed off the dust on his two principal characters and made them memorable."—Antisemitism Studies

From the Publisher

04/01/2020

Treachery, disguise, capture, and imprisonment—the scandal surrounding an ill-fated 19th-century French insurrection—is all the more captivating in this factual retelling. In 1832, the mother of a deposed heir to the French throne attempted to overthrow her brother-in-law, Louis-Philippe of France. Lacking adequate funding or local support from right-wing allies, the Duchesse de Berry's rebellion came to a disastrous end when she was betrayed by one of her own emissaries. Popular opinion, rather than condemning Marie-Caroline for the aborted coup, quickly turned against her disloyal betrayer, Simon Deutz, the son of the Chief Rabbi of France. According to Samuels (Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French, Yale Univ.) the scandal launched an anti-Semitic backlash among French aristocracy and the French press, remnants of which can be seen in the Dreyfus affair at the turn of the 20th century, and even up to the present day. Based on memoirs, contemporary newspaper reports, archival documents, and secondary sources, this tumultuous but largely forgotten period of French history is effectively reexamined. VERDICT Recommended for readers of Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and 19th-century French history and literature.—Linda Frederiksen, formerly with Washington State Univ. Lib., Vancouver

Library Journal

Read More