The Search for the Man in the Iron Mask: A Historical Detective Story by Paul Sonnino (review)

It is not common to begin an academic book review with a spoiler alert, but Paul Sonnino has carefully arranged The Search for the Man in the Iron Mask. so that the solution unfolds across the volume. Scholars who plan to read the book might skip this to save for themselves the pleasure of having Sonnino, who always writes with verve, lead them through his impressive archival research and decades-long hunt on his own terms.

Sonnino begins by suggesting that "we don't know very much about the age of Louis XIV until we can liberate ourselves from the mystery of the man in the iron mask." He frames this in contrast to "longues durées, discourses, and representations […] models, paradigms, and structures" that, he claims, offer dubious insight into the time. (p. 9) He returns to this theme when a line of investigation is destroyed by notarial documents: "how many theories, much more abstract and intricate than this one, which enjoy wide credence among historians […] would stand for a moment if they were subject, like this one, to invalidation or verification by a single document?" (p. 35) These comments, first given in 1991, reflect Sonnino's well-known take on historiography, a "radical empiricism" that avoids dogmatic skepticism through the investigation of the particular and the human. Speculation and inference are still allowed by Sonnino's rules, but only in limited domains.

Some of the connections that Sonnino draws may lose readers, although the overall reasoning, which ties the prisoner to a valet privy to the secretive dispersal of Cardinal Mazarin's estate, including, it seems, jewels from Henrietta Maria, hangs together. Chapters 7 and 9, on the death of Mazarin and the experiences of Nicolas de Fouquet and the unfortunate valet in prison, are particularly inspiring examples of how Sonnino's efforts to combine fact and imaginative sensitivity can open convincing windows into the mentalités. of individuals. This reader found it unlikely that the man in the iron mask kept himself sane during his imprisonment by serving "for the libidinal relief" of Bénigne Dauvergne de Saint-Mars and other officers, a suggestion that Sonnino thinks may explain the evidence that he was treated with deference by them because he was "an object of their fantasies." (p. 154 and 152) Many grand narratives of history might appear more plausible than that a prisoner of over eighteen years could command such erotic passions, since time and familiarity would surely have withered his charms. But then, tastes and preferences do vary, as Sonnino himself would acknowledge.

Other readers may balk at the idea that Fouquet would be put to such a scandalous trial—with the opportunity to drag out his accusations against Mazarin—if Louis XIV were so concerned to bury his secrets. But Sonnino's depictions of the tensions and inconsistencies on both the cultural level (prisoners who were isolated from all contact with the world but maintained with a valet who would also need to be kept quiet) and the personal (Louis XIV as "a terrifying monarch in terror of his most helpless subject") reinforce Sonnino's approach to conspiracies as neither too perfect nor too rational to be human (p. 144).

Sonnino's sense of people—from the repulsive Mazarin to the hapless Anne of Austria—resonates throughout. True to his theory, Sonnino denies himself some opportunities to draw larger themes, but the less abstemious can find some: the many legacies of Mazarin, the perilous intimacy of valets with their masters, the willingness of some to bend or break the law but not to violate social custom, and the tendency of eighteenth-century political gossip to imagine some kinds of corruption (heterosexual love affairs, hidden pregnancies or twins, or revenge plots) but not others, like that admixture of venality, ambition, and fear so well described here.