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The Betrayal of the Duchess: The Scandal That Unmade the Bourbon Monarchy and Made France Modern
Maybe someday
43
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
41/100Critics
44/100Scholars
Author:
Maurice Samuels
Publisher:
Basic Books
Date:
April 14, 2020
Fighting to reclaim the French crown for the Bourbons, the duchesse de Berry faced betrayal at the hands of one of her closest advisors in this story of power and revolution.
What The Reviewers Say
Samuels sets this...within a suspenseful, entertaining narrative that provides vivid portraits of its two subjects.
...Maurice Samuels, a professor of French at Yale, offers an engaging account of the duchess’s bold, if futile, efforts to install her son on the French throne. He gives almost as much attention to Deutz’s story as to hers and holds him responsible, in part, for the vehement anti-Semitism of the French religious right later in the 19th century.
Treachery, disguise, capture, and imprisonment—the scandal surrounding an ill-fated 19th-century French insurrection—is all the more captivating in this factual retelling.
Samuels...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.
