Amantes y reinas

The story of women like Gabrielle d'Estrées or Madame du Barry, Anne of Austria or Marie Antoinette, lovers and queens who turned their supposed weakness into an instrument of domination. For centuries it has been preached that entrusting any government responsibility to a woman would be "something that would be repugnant to nature [...], a subversion of right order and of all principles of justice". However, especially in the France of the Ancien Régime, women have arrogated this power to themselves, rendering in practice the laws and customs that denied it to them. The most prominent of all was Catherine de' Medici, who managed to keep royal authority intact for thirty years. But together with the queens - and often at the same time and in antagonism with them - other women exercised, in the centuries before the Revolution, an enormous influence on the internal and external political balances of the French monarchy: the extremely powerful royal mistresses, who they had to learn to use cunning, to corrupt, to punish... and to leave the scene at the right time. An essential journey that reaffirms, with the rigor and narrative skill of Craveri, the repercussion and relevance that women exerted in moments as convulsive as they were defining in history.