Book Review: Jonathan Beckman’s How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair
Few episodes in European history blend scandal, politics, and psychological intrigue quite like the Affair of the Diamond Necklace—a tale of deception so operatic that even today it feels almost unreal. In How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair, Jonathan Beckman resurrects that extraordinary true story with the pace of a thriller and the precision of a historian. The result is a book as glittering and treacherous as the necklace itself.
Beckman begins in the waning years of Louis XVI’s reign, when France was teetering on the brink of revolution and public opinion of Marie Antoinette had already soured. Into this volatile climate stepped Jeanne de La Motte, a penniless noblewoman with the cunning of a con artist and the ambition of a courtier. Through a web of forged letters, false identities, and sexual manipulation, Jeanne convinced the Cardinal de Rohan—desperate to win back the Queen’s favor—that he was secretly acting as Marie Antoinette’s intermediary in the purchase of an impossibly expensive diamond necklace. The jewels were real; the Queen’s involvement, entirely fabricated. When the scheme collapsed, it wasn’t Jeanne who paid the ultimate price—it was Marie Antoinette, whose reputation was irreparably destroyed.
Beckman handles this tangled narrative with masterful clarity. He has the gift of explaining the labyrinthine protocols of Versailles without ever losing the reader in them. His reconstruction of the Affair’s players—the credulous Cardinal, the theatrical Jeanne, the complicit forgers, and the increasingly isolated Queen—is as vivid as fiction. Yet the book’s brilliance lies not just in its storytelling but in its analysis. Beckman shows how the scandal became a political earthquake, transforming Marie Antoinette from a frivolous queen into a symbol of royal corruption in the eyes of the French public.
One of the book’s finest achievements is its refusal to indulge in easy villainy or victimhood. Beckman’s Marie Antoinette is neither saint nor sinner, but a woman trapped in the optics of monarchy—a foreign-born queen already hated for her spending, her accent, her body. The diamond necklace, which she never ordered and never wore, became the perfect emblem for every grievance against her. Beckman argues persuasively that the Affair was less about fraud than about the collapse of trust between ruler and ruled.
The prose itself is a pleasure: elegant, ironic, and often darkly funny. Beckman writes with a sly awareness that history’s greatest scandals are rarely about the size of the jewels but the scale of the illusion. His research is meticulous—he draws on court records, trial transcripts, and contemporary pamphlets—but the scholarship never weighs the narrative down. Instead, he reads the Affair as a parable about image and misinformation, a subject that feels eerily modern.
For readers interested in the fall of the Ancien Régime, How to Ruin a Queen is both history and cautionary tale. It sits comfortably alongside Antonia Fraser’s Marie Antoinette: The Journey and Deborah Cadbury’s Queen Victoria’s Matchmaking, though Beckman’s tone is more forensic, his wit more cutting. He gives us the anatomy of a scandal that, in its absurdity and cruelty, foretold the violence to come.
By the book’s end, Marie Antoinette has not yet lost her head, but she has lost everything that mattered to her image: innocence, credibility, and the illusion of majesty. Beckman leaves us with the haunting sense that revolutions rarely begin with ideals—they begin with stories, and the most dangerous ones are those everyone wants to believe.
