September 24, 2020 43
The Duchess & the Jews
David A. Bell
The Betrayal of the Duchess :
The Scandal That Unmade
the Bourbon Monarchy and
Made France Modern
by Maurice Samuels.
Basic Books, 398 pp., $32.00
Two very different stories can be told
about the Jews in modern France. The
first is one of liberation and opportunity.
It begins with the granting of full civil
rights to French Jews during the revo-
lution of 1789, after centuries in which
the small number who had the right to
live in the country suffered from enor-
mous legal discrimination. It continues
with the opening up of French society
to them in the nineteenth century, the
community’s rapid growth, and the rise
to prominence of Jews such as the so-
ciologist Émile Durkheim, the actor
Rachel Félix, the politician Adolphe
Crémieux (who served as minister of
justice), and the painter Camille Pis-
sarro (before 1900, few Jews elsewhere
had such visibility). It concludes with
the undeniable success and prosperity
of French Jews today. France in 2020
has the third- largest Jewish population
in the world after the United States
and Israel. French Jews receive higher
education degrees at a rate twice that
of the general population. They are
disproportionately represented at the
top of many fields, from business to en-
tertainment to academia to politics. To
take just one example, the showrunner,
star, and many lead actors in the most
successful French television series of
recent years, Le bureau des légendes
(released in the US as The Bureau), all
have Jewish ancestry.
But there is another, darker story.
It begins with the survival of anti-
Semitism in France in the revolutionary
era, exemplified by the emperor Napo-
leon’s “infamous decree” of 1808 that
accused the Jews of usury and again re-
stricted their rights. It moves on to the
explosion of anti- Semitic hatred in the
late nineteenth century, culminating in
the Dreyfus Affair. In that blatant mis-
carriage of justice, French courts twice
convicted an innocent Jewish army offi-
cer, Alfred Dreyfus, of treason, and al-
though he was eventually exonerated, a
tsunami of anti- Jewish invective, accom-
panied by widespread violence, swept
across the country. The story reaches its
nadir in World War II, when the Vichy
government persecuted Jews on its own
initiative and willingly collaborated with
the Nazis to send more than 77,000 to
their deaths. And it persists today with
widespread anti- Semitic violence, in-
cluding terrorist attacks committed by
radicalized French Muslims.
Both these stories, of course, are true.
The history of modern French Jewry
is fraught and paradoxical, at once in-
spiring and dispiriting. No other Jewish
community in the world today is simul-
taneously so successful and so fragile.
In a poll, taken last year, 55 percent of
French Jews said they have considered
emigrating, and 29 percent think that
“Jews should leave France now.”
In recent years, few if any scholars
have done more to explore the con-
tradictions of modern French Jewish
history than Maurice Samuels. A pro-
fessor of French at Yale and founding
director of the university’s Program for
the Study of Antisemitism, he is partic-
ularly known for The Right to Differ-
ence: French Universalism and the Jews
(2016). Today, many French politicians
and intellectuals argue that civic equal-
ity and cohesion require the denial of
public recognition to any form of eth-
nic and religious difference, an idea
they trace back to what they call the
“universalism” of the Enlightenment
and the French Revolution. Samuels,
using a series of mostly literary and
artistic case studies, deftly showed that
French Jews in the past found ways tomaintain a distinct communal identity
without threatening either universal
values or civic cohesion. (The demon-
stration had implications not just for
French Jews today, but also for French
Muslims.) The Right to Difference also
offered a sprightly and entertaining
introduction to modern French Jewish
history in general.In his new book, The Betrayal of the
Duchess, Samuels argues that the rise
of a distinctly modern French anti-
Semitism took place earlier than gen-
erally thought and can be dated with
strange precision to November 6, 1832.
On that day, Simon Deutz, the son of
the chief rabbi of France, betrayed to
the French authorities Princess Marie-
Caroline, the Duchesse de Berry, who
was leading a rebellion on behalf of her
son, the “legitimist” (Bourbon) claim-
ant to the throne. Although Deutz had
converted to Catholicism, the duchess’s
ultra- right supporters vilified him in
grossly anti- Semitic terms. This abuse,
Samuels argues, differed markedly
from older forms of Jew- hatred and set
a pattern that has endured down to the
present.
Samuels sets this argument within
a suspenseful, entertaining narrative
that provides vivid portraits of its two
subjects. The duchess was born into the
royal family of Naples, a descendant of
both Bourbons and Habsburgs. In 1816,
at age seventeen, she came to France to
marry the Duc de Berry, the nephewof the Bourbon king Louis XVIII (the
brother of Louis XVI, he had reclaimed
the throne after the fall of Napoleon).
A tiny woman with bad teeth and stra-
bismus, she initially devoted herself to
the pleasures of Paris. But in 1820 her
husband was stabbed by a radical as-
sassin in front of the Opera and died in
her arms. The murder seemingly put an
end to the Bourbon dynasty, since nei-
ther the king nor his brother Charles,
the Duc de Berry’s father, had surviv-
ing male descendants (under France’s
Salic Law, only men could inherit the
throne). But seven months later theduchess triumphantly gave birth to a
son: Henri, the so- called miracle child.
The dynastic succession, however,
was anything but assured. The duch-
ess’s father- in- law, Charles, succeeded
Louis as king in 1824, but quickly alien-
ated much of the country with his reac-
tionary policies, which led to the July
Revolution of 1830. When liberal revo-
lutionaries took control of Paris, Charles
tried to abdicate in favor of his young
grandson, but instead his cousin Louis-
Philippe, from the Orléans branch of
the family, became king, promising to
unite the grievously divided country
under a centrist, moderate regime. The
Bourbons departed for a moldy exile
in England, but the duchess refused to
abandon her son’s claim to the throne.
In 1832, with Louis- Philippe’s regime
looking shaky after a cholera epidemic
and an abortive left- wing uprising (the
one made famous by Victor Hugo
in Les Misérables), she slipped into
France to lead a legitimist revolt.Simon Deutz’s German- born father,
Emmanuel, became chief rabbi of
France in 1810. Simon, born in 1802,
grew into a troubled and unruly young
man who could not complete his stud-
ies or settle upon a profession, although
he could show considerable charm.
In 1827, following the example of a
brother- in- law, he became a Catholic.
He may well have done so as a result
of a genuine spiritual crisis, but he also
hoped the church would give a largematerial reward to so high- profile a
convert. In the event, he squandered
the opportunity and continued to drift
from one failure to the next, including
an unlikely attempt to start a high- end
Catholic bookstore in New York City.
Back in Europe, he traded on his ce-
lebrity among Catholics to wangle an
introduction to aristocratic legitimists.
Through them, in early 1832 he met
the duchess, gained her trust, and even
carried messages from her to the king
of Portugal, who she hoped would sup-
port her son’s claim to the throne.
On April 30, 1832, the duchess landed
in southern France to take the leader-
ship of the legitimists. But her rebellion
was a fiasco from the start. Unable to
gain support in the south, she disguised
herself as a peasant boy and made
her way to the western region of the
Vendée, whose legitimist sympathies
dated back to the French Revolution,
when the government had suppressed a
royalist uprising there with huge loss of
life. But even with the help of local no-
bles, this new Joan of Arc could not get
more than a few hundred armed men
into the field at any one time, and the
national army and police quickly sup-
pressed what Samuels, with some ex-
aggeration, calls a “civil war.” In early
June, the duchess went into hiding in
the nearby Breton city of Nantes.
In the summer of 1832, as the po-
lice scoured Nantes for any sign of her,
Deutz made contact with leading fig-
ures in Louis- Philippe’s government.
He told them he had the duchess’s trust
and would locate her for the authorities.
He insisted that his motivation was pure:
to save France from violent turmoil. But
he also wanted payment for his services,
and eventually settled on the consider-
able figure of 500,000 francs. He trav-
eled to Nantes, sought out legitimists
there, and told them he had confidential
messages for the duchess. In late Octo-
ber he was taken to her hiding place in
the rue Haute- du- Château, though he
could not identify the building after-
ward. But on November 6 he went to
see her again, bringing from support-
ers letters written in invisible ink, one
of which warned that the duchess had a
traitor in her entourage. This time the
police were close behind him.
There followed a dramatic scene to
which Samuels does full justice. As
the police and soldiers burst into the
house, the duchess and three follow-
ers squeezed into a secret hiding place
built during the Revolution. While the
authorities ransacked every room, the
fugitives remained hidden for many
hours, using a hat as a chamber pot.
But the compartment stood next to a
fireplace, and during the night, cold and
frustrated soldiers built a fire to stay
warm. The fugitives began to choke and
their clothes began to smolder, forcing
them to pour out the contents of the hat
in a desperate attempt to extinguish ris-
ing flames. Finally they had no choice
but to stumble out into captivity.
This pathetic scene brought an end
to the legitimist rebellion, and to the
hopes of the Bourbons more gener-
ally. The duchess’s reputation as a ro-
mantic heroine soared, even among
nonroyalists, only to fall precipitously
when it became clear that, twelveAn engraving of the capture of the Duchesse de Berry at Nantes, 1832Chronicle/Alamy