44 The New York Review
years after her husband’s death, she
was pregnant, most likely by a hand-
some young supporter who had been
in hiding with her. The pregnancy gave
Louis- Philippe’s government an excuse
to expel her from the country rather
than put her on trial. A quick marriage
(helpfully backdated by the Vatican) to
an impecunious Italian prince named
Ettore Lucchesi- Palli rescued her from
complete disgrace.
To her legitimist supporters she re-
mained, as Samuels puts it, “a saint.”
Her rushed second marriage turned
out to be surprisingly happy, and she
lived for nearly forty more years in
exile. Even as another revolution in
1848 was followed by the rise and fall
of another Napoleon (Napoleon III),
she defended her son’s right to the
throne. In the 1870s Henri finally had
his chance when conservative republi-
cans offered it to him in yet another at-
tempt to establish a centrist regime that
could reconcile France’s bitterly hostile
political factions. But the project foun-
dered when the “miracle child,” who
had grown into a stiff- necked and neur-
asthenic curmudgeon, refused to make
the necessary compromises, including
acceptance of the revolutionary tri-
color as the national flag. So France
resisted the lure of a new restoration
and remains a republic to this day, al-
beit, since Charles de Gaulle, one with
a very monarchical presidency.
Deutz, meanwhile, collected his re-
ward, but also earned instant infamy.
Newspapers—and not just ultra- right
ones—attacked him as a new Judas Is-
cariot. They quickly ceased even to ac-
knowledge his conversion and referred
to him simply as an “odious Jew.” A
hostile engraving gave him such dark
skin and thick lips that he appeared
part Jewish, part African—two stereo-
types converging in a single image.
While the French Jewish community
tried to disassociate itself from him,
Deutz, spurned by his former Catholic
sponsors for his treachery, reconverted
to Judaism. He spent several years in
London and tried to salvage his rep-
utation by writing a pamphlet enti-
tled The Arrest of Madame. At once
pompous and self- pitying, it backfired
spectacularly, reigniting ferocious crit-
icism from across the political spec-
trum. Victor Hugo, despite having
largely left behind his own youthful
ultra- royalism, wrote a poem that de-
nounced Deutz and called Jews “im-
pure merchants to whom one sells one’s
soul.” Deutz eventually fled Europe for
New Orleans, and in 1846 his family re-
ceived word that he had died there. But
Samuels finds no convincing evidence
for his death in the city’s records, and
concludes that quite possibly “Simon
Deutz did not so much die as vanish in
the New World, blending into the great
American melting pot and taking his
secrets with him.”
Samuels is hardly the first scholar to
tell the story of the duchess’s betrayal.
It has had a minor place in most stan-
dard histories of the period, and a
larger one in the pious accounts written
by those diehards who have longed for a
return of a king to France (today a tiny
band indeed, and divided in their loy-
alties between Bourbon and Orléanist
pretenders). But 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 com-
edy (the duchess and Deutz were both
bumbling and incompetent conspira-
tors). Samuels has also shifted the focus
from the duchess to Deutz and made an
ambitious argument. “The betrayal of
the duchesse de Berry,” he writes,marks... the moment at which
modern stereotypes of the Jew
crystallized in the popular imagi-
nation. Simon Deutz represents a
bridge between old and new forms
of antisemitism. He is the missing
link between Judas and Dreyfus.Samuels means two things here.
First, gentiles started seeing Jews as
racially as well as religiously distinct.
Second, and more broadly, Samuels
borrows the Israeli historian Shulamit
Volkov’s contention that by the time of
Dreyfus, Jews in Europe had become
a symbol of everything conservatives
hated about modernity: “capitalism,
liberalism, parliamentary democracy,
cosmopolitanism.” It was in the affair
of the duchess, Samuels writes, that
this “cultural code of antisemitism
really coalesced in France.”
The argument is an intriguing one,
and eminently plausible. To be sure,
racial anti- Semitism did not suddenly
arise in the early nineteenth century.
Centuries before, as Samuels acknowl-
edges, church and state in Spain dis-
tinguished the suspect descendants
of converted Jews and Muslims from
other Christians by what they termed
“purity of blood.” Nor have more re-
cent anti- Semites always seen Jews as
symbols of a frightening, atomized,
rootless modernity. Sometimes, as
Samuels knows well, they have seen
them as exactly the opposite. A long
tradition of left- wing anti- Semitism in
France has blamed Jews for holding
on to a primitive, archaic, and irratio-
nal communal identity in defiance of
the Enlightenment’s universal modern
values. And the historian David Niren-
berg in Anti- Judaism: The Western
Tra d i t i o n (2013) has identified deep
continuities between modern forms of
what he calls “anti- Judaism” and an-
cient doctrines that associate Jews with
carnality and sin.
Still, the anti- Semitism that pervades
the darker side of modern French Jew-
ish history has correlated particularly
strongly with a fear and suspicion of
liberal, capitalist, secular modern ways.
It is not surprising that it took off so
strongly in the 1880s, the decade that
brought the consolidation of France’s
militantly secular Third Republic. In
the fin de siècle, the ideological descen-
dants of the Duchesse de Berry con-
jured up a vision of an ethnically pure
country, its population bound to the
soil, loyal to ancient national traditions
and an even more ancient Christian
faith, organized into an organic, nat-
ural social hierarchy. It was a fantasy
that served as a vivid counterpoint to
the reality of an increasingly mobile,
secular, industrializing, cosmopolitan,
immigrant- friendly, and imperial re-
public, whose (male) citizens were at
least theoretically equal before the law.
And what better symbol of this Repub-
lic than the Jews: allegedly rootless,
cosmopolitan, excelling in commerce,
and loyal to the revolutionary tradition
that had emancipated them a century
before? As early as 1886, the jour-
nalist Édouard Drumont wove these
poisoned threads together into a toxictwo- volume compendium entitled La
France juive (Jewish France). It be-
came one of the greatest best sellers in
French history, enriched the Flammar-
ion publishing house (still in business),
and deeply influenced Hitler’s Mein
Kampf.It is no coincidence, as Samuels notes,
that in this book Drumont gave consid-
erable space to Simon Deutz—“the oily,
viscous, creeping, thick- lipped Jew”—
and his betrayal of that “knightly, in-
trepid Aryan,” the Duchesse de Berry.
For Drumont’s readers, the story pro-
vided a perfect illustration of the dangers
that the Jews posed to France. Samuels
also notes that as anti- Semitism grew
more intense in the 1880s, references
to Deutz and his betrayal exploded. Be-tween 1890 and 1910, the decades of the
Dreyfus Affair, over 250 articles about
the older case appeared in the French
press. Another upsurge in attention
took place during World War II, when
a collaborationist newspaper published
an entire special edition devoted to
Deutz and his treachery.
The increased importance the case
took on after 1880, however, raises
questions about its earlier significance.
What does it really mean to say that
it led modern stereotypes of the Jew
to “crystallize”? If Deutz had not be-
trayed the duchess, would this crystal-
lization not have taken place? It seems
unlikely. And if the case was so crucial,
why did it take another half- century for
it to acquire its full dimensions in the
French anti- Semitic imagination? Sam-
uels doesn’t address these questions suf-
ficiently. He devotes the first 272 pages
of the book to the life stories of the
duchess and Deutz, and to the dramatic
circumstances of her capture. Only in
the last fifty- one pages does he under-
take a systematic analysis of the case’s
place in the larger histories of French
Jewry and French anti- Semitism. It’s
not quite enough to substantiate his
ambitious thesis or to prove that this
was, to quote the book’s subtitle, “the
scandal that... made France modern.”
(The entire subtitle represents the sort
of overkill publishers so often succumb
to these days—how could the betrayal
of the duchess have “unmade the Bour-
bon monarchy” when that monarchy
had fallen two years earlier?)
At the time these events actually oc-
curred, they arguably fed more easily
into older patterns of religious anti-
Semitism than into the newer racialones that would soon become dominant.
As Samuels notes, legitimist descrip-
tions of Deutz in the 1830s universally
compared him to Judas Iscariot. The
Romantic writer Chateaubriand, in a
pamphlet dedicated to the duchess, saw
Satan himself at work in the case, while
casting the duchess’s hiding place as a
“Gehenna.” This religious framing was
overt and explicit. As for the equation
of Jews with capitalist, liberal moder-
nity, the seeds of the idea may have been
there in 1832, but it would take later
writers to spell it out and transform it
into anti- Semitic dogma.
Just as important, we need to con-
sider Deutz’s success in worming his
way into the duchess’s confidence. It is
very much to be doubted that Marie-
Caroline’s ideological successors a
half- century later would so easily have
accepted a converted Jew as a genuine
Christian. A half- century after that,
the Nazis were sending Christian de-
scendants of converted Jews to the gas
chambers. Race had become the basis
of identity. But for the duchess in 1832,
Deutz’s baptism really did wash him
clean of his Jewish origins. It could of
course be argued that Deutz’s betrayal
itself led French anti- Semites to believe
in race above all else—to believe that
conversion could not overcome biol-
ogy. The hostile descriptions of Deutz
from the 1830s already emphasized his
Semitic features, and at least one spoke
of his “apparent” conversion.
But did these anti- Semites consider
Deutz’s conversion to be essentially im-
possible, or simply insincere? Samuels’s
brief analysis does not provide a clear
answer. The book puts considerable
stress on the Victor Hugo poem, which
brings together “all of the elements
of this emerging right- wing antisemi-
tism.” But the poem, after first calling
Deutz a Jew, corrects itself: “He is not
even a Jew! He is a disgusting pagan, /A
renegade... /A putrid apostate.” A
Jewishness that can be renounced is
not a racial identity. If, in the history of
anti-Semitism, Simon Deutz represents
the “missing link between Judas and
Dreyfus,” he came closer to the first
than to the second.
Even so, Samuels is right to insist on
the importance of the case to the his-
tory of French Jewry. The year 1832
lay a little less than halfway between
the end of France’s Old Regime, with
its official discrimination against Jews,
and the Dreyfus Affair, with its anti-
Semitic furies. It was a period in which
the French Jewish community grew
rapidly and prospered. But even in this
relatively quiescent time, an incident
like Deutz’s betrayal of the duchess
could, in an instant, set off an outpour-
ing of anti- Semitic vitriol and provide
material out of which writers would
renew old, noxious myths and forge
new, even more noxious ones.
Myths of this sort have real, lasting
power. Even when they seem to have
vanished almost entirely, an apparently
random incident can reawaken them
with frightening force. Samuels’s book
shows brilliantly that both the stories
we can tell about the history of French
Jews—the sunny, optimistic one and
the dark, tragic one—have followed
erratic, often unpredictable courses.
A community that thought itself estab-
lished and prosperous at one moment
could suddenly find itself thrown back
into terrible fragility and danger. Will
this element of the French Jewish past
repeat itself? QAn etching of Simon Deutz that was used
as the frontispiece of The Truth About
the Arrest of Madame, Duchesse de Berry,
or the Lies of Deutz Revealed
by Ignace-Xavier Morel, 1836Bibliothèque Nationale de France