Anne of Austria: Regent, Mother, Queen

In November 1615, a fourteen-year-old Spanish infanta was handed across a river on the French border and became Queen of France. Fifty years later, she died in the Louvre as the most experienced political actor of her century — and was almost immediately caricatured out of her own life.

Anne of Austria's marriage to Louis XIII was childless for twenty-three years, shadowed by suspicion, and nearly broken by Richelieu. When the Dauphin at last arrived in 1638, the court called him Louis-Dieudonné — God-given. Five years later, Anne was a widow and regent of a kingdom at war. Against a civil war she had not chosen, against princes, parlements, and her own brother in Madrid, she kept the crown intact and handed it, in 1661, to her twenty-two-year-old son.

Drawing on French, Spanish, and Roman archives, this book reads Anne as she acted: a political operator of uncommon patience, a religious patron who built Val-de-Grâce, and a mother whose teaching shaped the absolutism of Louis XIV. It restores a queen the nineteenth century worked hard to erase.