Daughter of the celebrated salon-keeping socialite Mme Geoffrin, the Marquise de la Ferté-Imbault hoped for many years to get away from this possessive and authoritarian parent with whom her relationship was extremely difficult. Her arranged marriage with an heir to an old aristocratic family, the d'Estampes, enabled her to take her place among them in their access to the Court. So she was officially 'presented' to the king, the queen and the royal family, and soon joined the guests invited to the king's intimate suppers.

Thanks to her new relations, she was able to defend the vital interests of the in Saint-Gobain royal mirror manufactory, a company in which her dowry and entire fortune was invested, while her mother only had the usufruct of the rest of the family's fortune. After an epic discussion with the Controller General Peyrenc de Moras, who was not keen to renew the family's monopoly over the manufactory, she turned for support to her old acquaintance Madame de Pompadour. The capitalist and recently ennobled aristocrat invented in this way a modern form of business lobbying. Her powerful friends enabled her to enter into all kinds of alliances that provided her with support during the terrible conflicts between her and her mother and which find an echo today in the very recent Bettencourt affair. Shortly before her death (1791), the Reine des Lanturelus (Queen of the Lanturelus, her pseudonym) advised her subjects to scatter and 'join the Republic'' The Revolution was well under way by then and starting to empty Versailles.

185 pages
Edition : Perrin
Author : Maurice Hamon
Published in: October 2011
Dimensions: 162.0 x 215.0 cm
Language: french
ISBN : 978-2-262-03724-6