1740 and All That

Overall: very well written, very much biographie romancee in style - Stefan Zweig would have been delighted, and who knows, maybe was -, and also very opinionated. I looked up the author. He was Harold Acton, one of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s, best man to Evelyn Waugh during the later's first marriage, supposedly partly the model for Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. Scion of an Anglo-Italian family. Gay. Not a fan of Mussolini, thank God. Served in the RAF during WWII.

On to the narrative. Acton covers roughly a century, between the 1640s, when future Cosimo III. is born, to the death of Gian Gastone de' Medici, whereupon Franz Stephan gets the Duchy. He's focused on the family members and their wives - and btw, the end of the line came to be if this book is anything to go by because a couple of in varying degrees awful men married a couple of strong willed women, degree of awfulness debate worthy, several of whom did not behave as expected, and had catastrophic marriages with them - and blithely assumes you know at least a bit history if you've purchased this book and he doesn't have to explain everything from ground scratch.

( Harold Acton wants you to know why he picked THESE Medici and not the more famous ones )

( Ferdinando II: The Duke is not for Burning )

( Marguerite Louise d'Orleans: Vive la Resistance! )

( Cosimo III: How To Ruin Florence by Bigotry in 53 Years )

( Marguerite Louise: how to outrage your ex two countries away! )

( Gay Princes, Unwanted Wives: The Medici Variation )

( Cosimo tries to find alternate successors )

Cosimo dies. Gian Gastone ascends, the literal last of the Medici, save for his sister. He's so drunk all the time that he throws up out of his chaise when carried through Florence, so he rarely is. At meals he's not better - vomiting into his napkin, wiping his mouth with his periwig. Also: the Ruspanti. Who were they?

( The Ruspanti, or: are more than 300 male prostitutes in your bedroom enough, Sire? )

But: Gian Gastone's reign wasn't all sexual license and alcohol. After Cosimo's death, Gian Gastone immediately gets rid of the anti-Jewish and anti-Protestant laws his father had made, throws out corrupt churchmen from the government, and revoked the banishment of "new" (i.e. Galilean) ideas from the university of Pisa. He also separated Medici property from state property, being aware that despite his efforts, neither his sister nor Don Carlos would succeed him, and this way his sister could at least inherit the family possessions. Amazingly given thie condition he already was in by the time he took over, he managed a reign of 13 years before his alcoholism at last killed him. Because of his reforms, he was sincerely mourned. But the story of the Medici was over for good.