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Vincent J. Pitts. Embezzlement and High Treason in Louis XIV’s France: The Trial of Nicolas Fouquet; Paul Sonnino. The Search for the Man in the Iron Mask: A Historical Detective Story.

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 123; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ahr/123.2.643

1937-5239

Elizabeth Hyde,

European Political History Analysis

In the first days of March 1661, Cardinal Jules Raymond Mazarin lay dying in the château of Vincennes. He could reflect back on an extraordinary career. An Italian diplomat, he became a creature of Cardinal Richelieu, under whose tutelage he rose through the ranks of the French government to become first minister to the young King Louis XIV, for whom he successfully negotiated the Peace of the Pyrenees and the French victory over Spain. In addition to accumulating great power, Mazarin also accumulated great wealth, in the form of properties, titles, paintings, and jewels. And his fortunes, both political and financial, were inextricably intertwined with those of the crown. To set his complicated affairs in order, Mazarin dictated his testament, the terms of which set in motion the events explored in both volumes under review. These volumes, Paul Sonnino’s The Search for the Man in the Iron Mask and Vincent J. Pitts’s Embezzlement and High Treason in Louis XIV’s France: The Trial of Nicolas Fouquet, tackle the most intriguing and enduring scandals from the reign of Louis XIV: the dramatic Icarus-like fall of Nicolas Fouquet, the existence and identity of “the man in the iron mask,” and the possible connection between the two. Their stories have captured our collective historical imaginations, from seventeenth-century gossip, through Dumas’s nineteenth-century literary embroidery of them, to modern retellings on film. While not sacrificing the romance of mystery, accomplished scholars Sonnino and Pitts bring rigor and seriousness to their authoritative analyses. Their dueling stories of embezzlement, money laundering, cover-ups, and the hubris of power at the court of Louis XIV will resonate with new audiences in the twenty-first century.