The Betrayal of the Duchess: The Scandal that Unmade the Bourbon Monarchy and Made France Modern by Maurice Samuels

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Betrayal of the Duchess: The Scandal that Unmade the Bourbon Monarchy and Made France Modern by Maurice Samuels Robert J. Young The Betrayal of the Duchess: The Scandal that Unmade the Bourbon Monarchy and Made France Modern. By Maurice Samuels. New York: Basic Books, 2020. 383 pages. $19.99 (cloth). Maurice Samuels closes this very fine work with two and a half pages acknowledging the support that he, and the book, have received from a very large field of friends. One of those "friends" is his father, who apparently thought that it was high time for his son to write "something that normal people might actually read" (327). Today, I should think, dad is a very happy man, for The Betrayal of the Duchess is excellent in every respect, including the way it weaves together the biographies of its two principal characters. Because a good number of "normal" people will not be familiar with the story of the Duchess de Berry, a few introductory words may be helpful. Italian by birth, a Bourbon by genes, a widow at 21, her self-defined mission in life was to see her son inherit the throne of France from her uncle, the ruling King Charles X (1824–1830). In fact, this king was pushed off the throne by the July Revolution of 1830, and forced to flee to England when his cousin, Louis Philippe, of the Orléanist line, proclaimed himself "King of [End Page 397] the French." That seemed to scotch the plan to see her son installed as Henri V so, accordingly, the 32 year old duchess and her two children became part of Charles' retinue in England. At least she did so for a while; however, this remarkable lady, now calling herself Marie Caroline, had not given up. Between 1830 and 1832, first from England, then from northern Italy, the duchess managed to rally royalist supporters in southern and western France, people who considered themselves "Legitimists" of the Bourbon line, as opposed to the now ruling Orléanist usurpers. Propaganda, both public and private, was followed by sporadic fighting over the course of several weeks in May and June 1832, particularly in the Vendée, but on a scale that barely supports the common expression "civil war." The government forces of Louis Philippe soon prevailed over a disorganized and disheartened opposition, and in mid-June the duchess was forced to go into hiding in the northwest city of Nantes. It was there that she was betrayed by one of her confidantes, a betrayal that led to her incarceration in several gloomy fortresses, and eventually her eviction from France in June 1833—her hopes now dashed of ever seeing a Bourbon restoration in the form of her son. She died in 1870, having led a comfortable married life in Sicily and Austria. The man who betrayed her to the police services of the Orléanist regime was a German-born Jew whose father, by the 1830s, was the Chief Rabbi of Paris. Simon Deutz, the son, had spent his youth in Paris, living in a Jewish home situated in the Marais quarter. But in 1828, at the age of 26, and without a word to his father, Simon was baptized in Rome and awarded the Christian name of Hyacinthe. That conversion soon opened two doors. One led to the Bourbon-bred and Catholic duchess, who was set on toppling the regime of Louis-Philippe. The other door led to the Orléanist and Catholic regime of Louis-Philippe. Hyacinthe, whom Maurice Samuels continues to call Deutz, was thus in a position to potentially serve two diametrically opposed forces, although any reader would soon conclude that service to anyone but himself was foreign to Deutz. Having turned the duchess over to the police for a substantial financial reward, and having converted back [End Page 398] to Judaism, this remarkable character gets on a ship and basically disappears somewhere in New Orleans, under at least one assumed name. There is no record of the date of his death. That is the skeleton of a story to which Samuels gives flesh. He has been able to do so for three reasons...