On 5th May 1789, the French royal family processed in pomp and splendour through a room at the Palace of Versailles to the sound of applause and cheers. Exactly five months later, the palace was stormed and the royals left, surrounded by the decapitated heads of their bodyguards.
The Last Summer at Versailles tells the story of what happened in those five months as a political thriller as well as, perhaps unexpectedly, a mirror to the present.
Among the hundreds in the palace chamber on 5th May, there were six people - three women and three men - who will be the lenses through which this book tells its story. They were Queen Marie-Antoinette; a socialite Gabrielle, Duchess of Polignac; Madame Jeanne Campan, a bookworm who worked in the palace as a maid; the Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of the American War of Independence; the Comte de St.-Priest, a frustrated diplomat with liberal sympathies, and a radical journalist with a bad stutter called Camille Desmoulins.
Politics and personality were central to what happened that summer and they explain the selection of the six main figures in The Last Summer at Versailles. Ranging from Gabrielle de Polignac as the furthest to the Right and Camille Desmoulins as her equivalent on the Left, all the characters fall at points across the political spectrum. From right to left, Gabrielle, the Queen, St.-Priest, Campan, Lafayette, Desmoulins. However, their views shifted over the summer and not always in the direction that one might expect given their backgrounds or their reputations.
Chipping away at the uncomplicated and distracting mythology of the revolution allows it to become immediate again. The people in this book should no longer look of callous queens with towering coiffures or flag-carrying mobs motivated by a single cause. Instead - stripped of all the nonsense we have layered onto them - they look an awful lot like us.