Abstract
Long sidelined as trivial by decades of Annalist and Marxist scholarship, the fantastic story of the Diamond Necklace affair is now well and truly back. Popular entertainments like the 2002 Hollywood costume drama The Affair of the Necklace and modern scholarly studies are united in seeing this scandal of 1785, when a gang of adventurers perpetrated a breathtaking swindle in the Queen’s name, as both a catalyst of the French Revolution and a moulder of its outcomes. Robert Darnton’s brilliant anatomy of France’s alienated hacks, scandalous libellesand pornographic bestsellers (1982; 1984; 1996) has found a key place for Diamond Necklace smut in desacralizing ruling-class authority. In new and complex ways his Grub Street cartography underscores the verdict of eighteenth-century contemporaries like Goethe, Burke, Mirabeau and Napoleon that the affair brought the ancien rģimeto its knees and the monarchy to the guillotine.
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McCalman, I. (2003). The Making of a Libertine Queen: Jeanne de La Motte and Marie-Antoinette. In: Cryle, P., O’Connell, L. (eds) Libertine Enlightenment. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522817_8
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