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

A T HALF PAST five on the evening of November 6, 1832, police raided a house in a quiet residential enclave of Nantes, the largest city in Frances western region. Shoving past frightened servants, they moved methodically from room to room, overturning beds and rifling through wardrobes as twelve hundred soldierstwo entire army regimentsfiled into the dark cobblestone streets below to make sure that nobody could escape out the back. They were searching for the duchesse de Berry, the most wanted woman in France.

The mother of the heir to the throne, she had been forced into exile with the rest of the Bourbon royal family after the Revolution of 1830, only to return two years later to launch a bloody civil war. Her dream was to reconquer the kingdom for her eleven-year-old son. All through the spring she had commanded a guerrilla army in a series of battles against the government, but by the early summer she was on the run. And now, after six months of evading capture, the luck of the four-foot-seven duchess was coming to an end.

The police had been tipped off by the duchesss confidant, a seductive yet volatile man named Simon Deutz. He had pledged undying loyalty to her cause, then turned against her once it appeared that her campaign would fail. For a large cash reward, he had agreed to lead the police to her hiding place in Nantes. But when the agents forced their way into the house, the duchess was nowhere to be found.

Just minutes before, she had slipped into a secret closet behind the fireplace in the attic. Created during the Reign of Terror to save priests from the guillotine, the closet was so small that the duchess and her three accomplices could barely stand up straight and there was not an inch of space between them. Praying for a miracle, she tried not to move while the agents sounded the walls and knocked holes in the roof. She could hear the police commissioner cursing on the other side of the thin partition as he ordered his men to reduce the house to rubble in their efforts to find her.

After sixteen hours, the agents were about to give up the search when one of the soldiers standing guard in the room decided to light a fire. As the secret compartment filled with smoke and the walls glowed red with heat, the duchess did her best to endure the torment. Eventually, though, the trapdoor to the fireplace opened, and out crawled the tiny, soot-covered rebel. Straightening her scorched dress and shielding her eyes from the light, she declared in the most regal manner she could summon: I am the duchesse de Berry. You are French soldiers. I entrust myself to your honor!

T HOUGH LARGELY FORGOTTEN today, the betrayal of the duchess shocked the world at the time. It made international headlines and engrossed the public for months, all the more so when it emerged that the arrested duchess was pregnant, despite not having had a husband for over a decade. The case fascinated the leading writers of the day: Franois-Ren de Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo both wrote significant works about it, while Alexandre Dumas pre, the author of The Three Musketeers, returned to the events surrounding the betrayal in a novel, a historical chronicle, his own memoirs, and a memoir that he ghostwrote for the general charged with suppressing the duchesss revolt.

Beyond its many obvious attractionsa glamorous heroine, a quixotic military campaign, an illicit romance, and a dramatic double-crossthe scandal had major repercussions for French history. It ended the hopes for another Bourbon restoration and helped stabilize the monarchy of Louis-Philippe, who had claimed the throne in 1830 but whose grip on it was still tenuous. But the case also had another, and perhaps even more far-reaching, effect: Simon Deutz had been born a Jew, and his betrayal of the duchess provoked modern Frances first major outpouring of antisemitic hatred.

Historians often date the rise of modern antisemitism in France to the decade leading up to the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s. This notorious case, in which a Jewish army officer was falsely accused of treason, is considered a turning point in world history, the moment at which Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, claimed to have concluded that antisemitism made the dream of Jewish integration in Europe impossible. Yet the first real warning bellthe first signal that modernity would not necessarily be good for the Jewshad actually sounded some sixty years earlier, following the betrayal of the duchesse de Berry.