MANY HAVE MADE MOCK OF LOUIS XVI because, thus startled out of his sleep on 14th July 1789, by the news of the fall of the Bastille, he did not instantly grasp the import of what was then (in the political sense) substantially a new word—revolution. But, as Maeterlinck writes in Wisdom and Destiny: “It is easy for those who are wise after the event to see what ought to have been done when time has brought full knowledge of what was really taking place.” Neither the King nor the Queen was aware that their world was being devastated by an earthquake, but they did not stand alone in their lack of insight. Who among their contemporaries perceived in these opening hours the immensity of the drama upon which the curtain had just been rung up; who even among those who were the pioneers of the Revolution? The leaders of the new movement of the people—Mirabeau, Bailly and Lafayette—had not the remotest notion how, in defiance of their own wishes, the forces they were unchaining would shoot onwards to a mark far in advance of the goal they had contemplated; for in 1789 the very men who, a few years later, were to be the most bloodthirsty of the revolutionists, Robespierre, Marat and Danton, were still convinced royalists.
It was only thanks to the French Revolution that the term ‘revolution’ acquired that far-reaching, turbulent and historical meaning which attaches to it today. Time was needed for it to gain the peculiar stamp which was lacking to it in 1789. The paradox which was so disastrous to King Louis was, not that he could not understand the Revolution, but the very opposite, that, though a man of mediocre capacity, he earnestly endeavoured to understand. When Dauphin, when no more than a timid youth, Louis XVI had been fond of reading history, and nothing had made a profounder impression on him than his having introduced to him the famous David Hume, for a time an attaché at the British embassy in Paris, and author of The History of England, whose publication had begun in the year of Louis’s birth. This book had been the lad’s favourite reading. He had conned and reconned the chapter in which Hume described the revolutionary movement directed against Charles I, which culminated in the King’s execution. There can be no doubt that the lesson of what had happened to the unlucky Stuart monarch must have gone home to the heir of the Bourbon throne.
When, at the close of the eighteenth century, there began in France a movement akin to that which had ravaged England a hundred and fifty years before, it seemed to Louis XVI, reading and rereading Hume, that he might learn to guide his footsteps by recognising the mistakes of his unhappy predecessor. Hume could tell him what a king ought not to do in such circumstances! Where Charles had tried the strong hand, he would be gentle and pliable, and would thus (so he hoped) escape the crowning disaster. Yet this very attempt to read the riddle of the French Revolution by the light of English analogies was disastrous, seeing that circumstances were so utterly different. For in decisive moments of history, a ruler must not act in accordance with arid recipes or be guided by the endeavour to follow precedents which can never be wholly applicable to a new situation. Nothing but the prophetic insight of genius can discover the saving principle in the present situation; nothing but a hero’s creative impulse can tame the wild and confused energies of the elemental. Nor will anyone be enabled to ride out a storm by the expedient of furling sail, for if he does this his ship will be at the mercy of the winds and the waves.
Therein lay the tragedy of Louis XVI. He wanted to gain understanding of what to him was incomprehensible by studying history as if it had been a school book, and to safeguard himself against the Revolution by timidly abandoning all that had been kingly in his behaviour. It was otherwise with Marie Antoinette. She did not go to books for counsel, nor yet, in any considerable measure, to men or women. Even in times of the utmost peril, it was not her way to look before or after; calculation and combination were alien to her spontaneity of character. Her human strength rested entirely upon instinct. Now this instinct of hers rose from the outset in revolt against the Revolution. Born in a royal palace, brought up to believe in divine right, convinced that her privileges as a ruler were unchallengeable, she regarded any claim of her subjects to rights of their own as no more than an unwarrantable manifestation of impudence by the mob. One who demands unlimited freedoms and rights for himself is, indeed, the last person in the world to concede privileges and rights to others. For her the matter did not seem open to discussion. Like her brother Joseph she said: “Mon métier est d’être royaliste”—My job is to be a royalist. Her place was above, that of the populace was below; she would not stoop, and the people must not try to rise. From the time when the Bastille was stormed until she perished on the scaffold, she remained convinced that her position as absolute ruler was not open to question. Never for a moment did she, as far as her innermost feelings went, come to terms with the new movement, and ‘revolution’ seemed to her nothing more than a euphemism for flat rebellion.
Yet this arrogant, this unqualified condemnation of the Revolution, did not (at any rate to begin with), as far as Marie Antoinette was concerned, imply the slightest hostility towards the people. Having spent her childhood in the more genial atmosphere of Vienna, the Queen regarded ‘le bon peuple’ as comprising a mass of persons who were rather stupid, but thoroughly good-natured. She was certain that in due time the kindly crowd would turn away in healthy disillusionment from the agitators and spouters, would come back to its allegiance, would put its trust once more in those who knew what was best for it, in the hereditary ruling house. Her hatred was reserved for the ‘factieux’—for conspirators, agitators, demagogues of the political clubs, street orators, career-hunters and atheists, who, in the name of confused ideologies or in pursuit of self-interest, wanted to persuade the worthy populace to renounce its loyalty to the throne and the altar. “Un amas de fous, de scélérats”—a lot of idiots and rascals—such was her description of the deputies of twenty million Frenchmen. Those who had listened but for a moment to Korah and his company were for her anathema; those who were willing to make terms with the innovators were suspect. Lafayette, for instance, who tried to save her life and that of her husband and her children at the risk of his own, had no word of thanks from her; it would have been better to perish than to be rescued by this vainglorious aspirant to popular favour! Never, not even in prison, did she show honour by so much as a request, either to her judges (whose rights as judges she challenged, and whom she stigmatized as executioners), or to any one of the deputies. She was uncompromising in her defiance. From the first moment to the last, Marie Antoinette regarded the Revolution as nothing more than a filthy sea of mud, to which the sluices had been opened by the basest passions of humanity. She had not the remotest understanding, either of its historical justification or of its constructive will, being concerned only to maintain with the utmost resolution her own divine right as ruler.
Let us not deny that this lack of understanding was Marie Antoinette’s supreme defect. Since she was no more than an average woman, narrow-minded where political issues were concerned, having neither the will nor the training that would have made her competent to see beneath the surface of the abstract world or to grasp conceptual relationships, nothing but the immediately human aspect of things close at hand could appeal to her. Seen at close quarters and contemplated as the expression of our fallible humanity, every political movement looks confused and muddled. Invariably an ideal becomes caricatured as soon as its mundane realisation is attempted. How could Marie Antoinette be expected to do anything but judge the Revolution by what she thought of the personalities who were its leaders? And, as always happens in days of convulsive change, the loudest and most conspicuous were by no means the sincerest and the best. How could the Queen be otherwise than suspicious when the members of the aristocracy who were the first to espouse the cause of liberty were men of dubious reputation, heavily burdened with debt, and the most corrupt among their order—such men as Mirabeau and Talleyrand? How could Marie Antoinette believe the cause of the Revolution to be great, to be honourable, to be moral, when she saw that Philip, Duke of Orléans, who was avaricious, covetous, apt for unsavoury intrigue, posed as an enthusiast on behalf of the new doctrine of fraternity? What could she think of the revolutionary movement when the National Assembly chose as its favourite Mirabeau, a man both corrupt and obscene, spawn of the nobility, one whose manifold transgressions had earned him numerous terms of imprisonment, and who had subsequently made his living as a spy? Could a religion be divine which set up its altars to such as he? Was it reasonable to ask her to believe that fishwives and prostitutes who raged through the streets carrying human heads on pike points were really the vanguard of a new humanity?
Because she could see nothing but outbursts of uncontrolled violence, Marie Antoinette could not believe in the slogan of liberty; because she saw only individual human beings, she had no inkling of the glorious ideal which, invisible and impalpable, animated this savage and world-shaking movement. Hidden from her eyes were the great humanist and humanitarian achievements of a new development from which we derive the most magnificent principles of our mutual relationships. Freedom of religion, opinion and the press; freedom of occupation and the right of public meeting; the revolution which engraved equality of classes, races and creeds upon the tables of the law which have become the modern heritage; the revolution which swept away the shameful vestiges of the Middle Ages, the rack, the corvée and slavery—never could she discern these spiritual aims behind the crude uproar and tumult of the streets, and never did she try to understand what was afoot. All that she could catch a glimpse of amid the limitless turmoil was chaos. Veiled from her sight were the heralds of a new order which was to arise out of these horrible convulsions. From the first day till the last, therefore, she hated both leaders and led with the fervour of a defiant heart. The upshot was inevitable. Since Marie Antoinette was unjust to the Revolution, the Revolution was unjust to Marie Antoinette.
The Revolution was the enemy—such was the Queen’s standpoint. The Queen was the chief obstacle in its path—such was the fundamental conviction of the Revolution. With their infallible instinct, the masses of the people regarded the Queen as their essential, their fundamental adversary, and from the outset the fury of the campaign was concentrated upon her person. Louis XVI counted for nothing, either good or bad. This was well known to the stupidest peasant in the villages, to the youngest children in the streets. He could be so thoroughly frightened by a few musket-shots that he would be ready to accede to any demand. Clap the red bonnet of revolt upon his head, and he would wear it without protest. Order him to shout: “Down with the King! Down with the tyrant!” and, though himself King, he would make no demur. There was one person left in France to defend the throne, one vigorous will to stand firm against the Revolution. As Mirabeau put it, the Queen was “the only man at court”. Anyone, therefore, who was on the side of the Revolution must necessarily be against the Queen. It was at her that all guns were aimed.
In the opening phase of the Revolution, the revolutionary pamphleteers began to make it plain that Marie Antoinette was their target, and to describe Louis XVI as the true father of his people, as good, virtuous, noble-minded, though, unfortunately, infirm of purpose and ‘misled’. If only the royal philanthropist could get his own way, there would be perfect peace between the King and the nation. It was the Austrian woman, the foreigner from Vienna, guided by the counsels of her brother, in the toils of her lovers of both sexes, arbitrary, tyrannical—it was she who stubbornly resisted such an excellent understanding. She was continually hatching new plots in order to lay Paris in ruins by summoning troops from abroad. With devilish cunning she was trying to persuade the officers to fire their cannon upon the defenceless people. Thirsting for blood, she lavished wine and money on the soldiers to spur them on to the crime against which Camille Desmoulins had uttered his famous warning on the fourteenth of July: “A Saint Bartholomew of the patriots.” Surely it was time that the King’s eyes should be opened! Fundamentally, the adversaries entertained like thoughts of each other. Marie Antoinette considered that the people were good, but were misled by the ‘factieux’. The people, on the other hand, thought the King good, but egged on to mischief and blinded by his wife. The real struggle lay between the revolutionists and the Queen. While Marie Antoinette became more and more the object of popular hatred, and the target for calumny and invective, she herself grew increasingly stubborn. One who is resolutely leading or steadfastly resisting a great movement has his energies stimulated by opposition. Now that she was faced by a world in arms, the Queen’s childish arrogance was transformed into pride, and the powers which had previously been frittered away upon trifles underwent concentration to endow her with a vigorous character.
This belated development of Marie Antoinette’s forces could, however, take effect only in the defensive, for one whose ankles are shackled cannot march forwards to meet the foe. Marie Antoinette’s fetters were riveted upon her by the timidity of poor Louis. Smitten on the right cheek by the storming of the Bastille, next morning he humbly offered the left cheek to his assailants. Instead of flying into a rage, instead of blaming and chastising, he promised the National Assembly to withdraw from Paris the troops that were perhaps still ready to fight in his behalf—thus repudiating the defenders of the Bastille who had fallen for his sake. By refraining from a single word of censure upon those who had murdered the governor of the Bastille, he recognised the Terror as the legitimate power in France. His weakness was a justification of revolt. In gratitude for this abasement, Paris was ready enough to crown the accommodating ruler with flowers, and to give him (though only for a brief space) the title of ‘Restaurateur de la liberté française’. At the gates of the capital, Bailly, president of the third estate and of the National Assembly, and mayor of Paris, welcomed him with the ambiguous words: “Paris has achieved the reconquest of its King.” Subserviently Louis XVI pinned to his hat the tricolour cockade which the populace had adopted as a sign of rebellion against his authority, failing to realise that the acclamations of the multitude were not really uttered for his sake but in order to exult that their own strength had made their sovereign into their subordinate. On the fourteenth of July, Louis XVI had lost the Bastille; on the seventeenth, he threw the handle after the hatchet, cast aside his dignity, and made so profound an obeisance to his adversaries that the crown dropped from his head.
Since the King had made this sacrifice, Marie Antoinette had to follow suit. She was constrained to disavow those whom (with good reason) the new ruler, the people, hated most; to dissociating herself from her friends and playmates, the Polignacs and the Count of Artois, who were to be banished for ever from the realm of France. Had it not been forced upon her, the Queen would have been little troubled by this severance, since for a long time she had ceased to find her former light-minded associates congenial. But now, in the hour of parting, she felt cordial once more towards these companions of years that had seemed so happy and so free from care. She had shared in their follies; Madame de Polignac had known all her secrets and had helped her in the upbringing of her children. Now that the sometime favourite was being sent into exile, how could the Queen fail to recognise that farewell was also being said to her own untroubled youth? The nonchalant hours were passing away beyond recall. The porcelain and alabaster world of the eighteenth century had been shattered by the hard fists of the revolutionaries, and in the world now being fashioned there would be no place for delicate and refined enjoyment. The days that were dawning would be rough even if great, would be murderous even if mighty. The silver chimes of the Rococo were silent, and the joys of Trianon had vanished into the limbo of the past. Vainly trying to fight down her fears, Marie Antoinette found it impossible to say a personal farewell to her friends. She kept her chamber, being afraid that she could not maintain her composure before the public eye. In the evening, however, when in the courtyard below the carriages for the Count of Artois and his children, for the Duke of Condé, the Duke of Bourbon, Madame de Polignac, the ministers of state and the Abbé Vermond were waiting—were waiting for all those who had been the companions of her youth—snatching up a pen, she hastily scribbled a few lines to Madame de Polignac: “Adieu, dearest of friends. What a dreadful word ‘goodbye’, but I have to say it. Here is the order for the horses. I have only strength left to send you my love.”
Henceforwards there is this undertone of melancholy in all the Queen’s letters. Next day she wrote to Madame de Polignac: “I do not try to put into words the sorrow I feel at being separated from you, but I hope that you reciprocate my sentiments. I am fairly well, although shaken by this succession of blows. We are environed by hardships, misfortunes and ill-starred persons—to say nothing of those who have been sent away. Since all are deserting us, I am in truth happy to think that those in whom I am chiefly interested have had to depart.” Yet as if unwilling that her old friend should detect in her a weakness, as if she knew that a royal demeanour was the only thing remaining to her as a relic of her power as Queen, she went on to say: “You may be sure, however, that adversity has not lessened my strength or my courage. These I shall never lose. My troubles will teach me prudence. It is in such moments as the present that one learns to know people, and becomes enabled to distinguish between those who are and those who are not truly attached.”
A silence of death now surrounds this Queen whose taste it has always been to live amid turmoil. The great flight, the great desertion, has begun. Where are her former friends? They have vanished like the snows of yester-year. Those who used to resemble clamorous children round a table laden with Christmas presents—Lauzun, Esterhazy, Vaudreuil—where are they, the partners at cards, those who danced with her and who rode with her in the park of Versailles? There has been a ‘sauve-qui-peut’. They have left in disguise, not this time masked for a fancy-dress ball, but muffled up to the eyes for fear of being lynched by the populace. Evening after evening another carriage drives through the gilt gateway, never to return. Fewer and ever fewer footsteps sound in the wide halls. No theatre-going, no dances, no receptions! Only mass every morning, and thereafter to spend hours in the private cabinet, listening to the tedious reports and suggestions of the ministers, who are at their wits’ end. Versailles has been deserted by those whose first thought is for their own safety.
At this juncture, when the Queen had been forsaken by those whom the world believed to be her closest friends, there emerged from the darkness the man who had in very truth been her friend all along, Axel Comte de Fersen. So long as it brought power and glory to be accounted a favourite of Marie Antoinette, this exemplary lover, mindful of the honour of the woman he adored, had remained in the background, thus sheltering the most precious secret of her life from the eyes of the curious and from the tongues of scandalmongers. Now, when to appear in public as a friend of the maligned woman brought no advantage, no honour, no respect, no envy, when it needed courage and self-sacrifice—now Marie Antoinette’s only true lover and the only man she truly loved stepped boldly forwards to her side, and therewith made his entry upon the stage of history.