Simone Bertière

Simone Bertière, born in Lyon, is a French historian, biographer, and writer. She taught French and Greek in high school preparatory classes, and comparative literature at the University of Bordeaux and the École Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles, where she was a student herself. She wrote her first biography in 1990 on Cardinal de Retz, and went on to win a wide audience of readers, especially among history buffs. She is the author of a series of books on the queens of France, the sixth volume of which, Marie Antoinette, l'insoumise (Marie Antoinette, the Rebellious, 2002), received the Grand Prize in historical biography from the Académie française. She has also published, for Livre de Poche, an anthology of French 17th-century literature and an edition of the Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas, accompanied by a study of the historical novel.