‘Nous régnons trop jeune.’
‘We reign too young.’
Louis XVI (1754–93, reigned 1774–92)
EVEN BEFORE LOUIS XVI came to the throne in 1774, many people were convinced that he had condemned the monarchy to its doom.
In April 1770, the 15-year-old Prince, then called Louis Auguste, was married by proxy in a Viennese church to an Austrian, Maria Antonia Josepha Joanna, who was a year younger than him. Many courtiers at the palace of Versailles opposed the match. Not only was the girl foreign (known by her enemies as ‘l’Autrichienne’),fn1 she was a mere archduchess. Surely, the snobs asked, Louis XV could have found a true princess for his grandson? Was this not one step down the slippery social ladder towards the calamitous situation whereby a prince of the realm might one day marry, say, a kindergarten assistant, a salesman’s daughter, or a foreign actress?
This xenophobic nickname was in fact another example of anti-royal fake news. Certainly, Maria Antonia was from Vienna, but she was 50 per cent French, with an Austrian mother, Maria Theresa, a French father, François de Lorraine, and two French grandparents, Léopold, Duc de Lorraine, and Élisabeth-Charlotte d’Orléans (a granddaughter of Louis XIII). In fact, ‘l’Autrichienne’ was a true French princess of the blood, and was quickly renamed as such – Marie-Antoinette.
Her new husband, Louis Auguste, heir to the French throne, had only one French grandfather, Louis XV. His other grandparents were Princess Marie Leszczyńska of Poland, King Augustus III of Poland, and Maria Josepha, an Austrian archduchess. He was less French than Marie-Antoinette. To the snobs and gossips, though, this didn’t matter. They put it about that the French royal bloodline was being diluted, and the idea stuck in the popular imagination.fn2
There were also many people in Versailles who opposed the marriage for a more practical reason – lack of money. In 1770, Louis XV simply could not afford a lavish wedding for his grandson. After Marie-Antoinette was welcomed at court with a huge party, the King asked his Minister of Finance: ‘What did you think of my celebrations at Versailles?’ and got a wicked pun in reply: ‘Impayables.’ In colloquial French, this means ‘extraordinary’. Literally, it means ‘unaffordable’. The minister was right – many suppliers of food, fireworks and costumes for the royal festivities in 1770 were not paid. After the Revolution, some of them would present the new government with credit notes.
Doubts about the match between Louis Auguste and Marie-Antoinette went even deeper, right into the national subconscious. Both the wedding ceremony and the identity of the bride had superstitious people all over France delving into their almanacs. It was pointed out that the Austrian interloper was born on 2 November 1755, the day after a massive earthquake in Lisbon that had cost tens of thousands of lives. To people who still believed in a direct link between royalty and deity, such a birthday did not augur well. One of Marie-Antoinette’s French ladies-in-waiting, Henriette Campan, later remarked in her memoirs that the earthquake was a ‘catastrophe that seemed to put a fatal stamp on the time of [Marie-Antoinette’s] birth’.
Louis XV’s own family had been hit by plenty of tragedy in the years just before the new royal wedding. In 1765, the Dauphin (heir to the throne), Louis XV’s only son Louis Ferdinand, had died of a lung infection at the early age of 36. Louis Ferdinand’s own eldest son had died aged nine, leaving Louis Auguste, a much less charismatic boy, as heir.
If King Louis XV was hoping to put everyone’s mind at rest by announcing the swift arrival of the next royal generation, he must have had second thoughts as soon as he greeted Marie-Antoinette in the forest near Compiègne, just north of Paris, on 14 May 1770. He saw a pubescent girl with disappointing breasts (this was ‘the first thing he looked at’, he told his ambassador to Vienna). She was about the same age as the prostitutes he cavorted with at Versailles, but had none of Mademoiselle O’Murphy’s flirty sensuality. The King pronounced her ‘childish’. Louis Auguste, meanwhile, stood by awkwardly, a chubby figure doing little more than stare bemusedly at the girl to whom he had been married in his absence, and whom he was meant to bed in a few days’ time.
The following evening Marie-Antoinette made a sexual innuendo that must have delighted and deflated Louis XV at the same time. When informed primly that Madame du Barry’s role at court was ‘to give pleasure to the King’, Marie-Antoinette replied: ‘So I shall be her rival, for I also wish to give pleasure to the King.’
Marie-Antoinette wasn’t the only one to make a spectacle of her innocence. At dinner on 16 May 1770, after a wedding ceremony in Versailles at which both bride and groom had been present, the highly sexed Louis XV indulged in some macho badinage with his grandson. Or tried to, anyway.
‘Don’t overload your stomach before tonight,’ the King said.
‘Why not?’ Louis Auguste asked. ‘I always sleep better after a big dinner.’
It is all too easy to picture Louis XV being struck by a sudden premonition that the monarchy’s days were numbered. With almost comic symbolism, the firework display planned in Versailles for that evening was rained off. The princely squib was doubly damp.
Worse, when the city of Paris held a firework display two weeks later, on 30 May, in the place Louis XV (now place de la Concorde), a misfired rocket set off an explosion, causing a stampede in the packed crowd of spectators. More than 100 Parisians were trampled to death and hundreds were badly injured. The young royal couple donated a full year of their civil list income to the families of the dead and injured, but the damage was done. A black cloud hung over their union from the very start. Félicité de Genlis, a Versailles courtier and tutor to the royal family, referred to the Paris firework disaster as: ‘This deplorable event that everyone viewed with the darkest foreboding.’
Hindsight only added to the list of omens. Writing after the Revolution, Madame de Genlis pointed out the coincidence that so many deaths occurred on the very square where both Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI, as well as more than 1,000 of their supporters, would later be guillotined.
To those in search of eerie coincidences, the date on which the young couple’s wedding festivities officially ended seems to have been yet another nail in the royal family’s coffin – it was 14 July 1770, exactly 19 years to the day before the Bastille would be stormed by revolutionaries.
With so much misfortune overshadowing the marriage that was meant to ensure the future of the French monarchy, is it surprising that the regime would soon come to a bloody end?
Well, yes, because as we saw in the previous chapter, in 1770 the French people as a whole were not fantasizing about the day when they would be able to erect a scaffold on the place Louis XV and start removing royal heads. When Marie-Antoinette went to Paris for the first time that July, the crowds outside the Tuileries palace demanding to see her were so big that she appeared on a balcony to greet them and was met with rousing cheers. The Duc de Brissac, governor of Paris, told her that: ‘They are all in love with you.’
Starstruck French people would also make the trip to Versailles just to catch a glimpse of the Viennese girl. And after Louis XV’s death of smallpox in 1774, when the young couple took refuge from infection at La Muette, on the western edge of Paris, Madame Campan noted that: ‘The shouts of “vive le Roi” started at six in the morning and went on almost without interruption until sundown.’ She also wrote about a Parisian jeweller who made a fortune from hastily produced lockets containing a portrait of Marie-Antoinette in mourning for Louis XV. ‘Never’, Madame Campan said, ‘has the start of a reign evoked a bigger show of love and affection.’
The problem for the French royal family was not so much that the stars were set against Louis XVI, or that anti-Austrian factions were determined for the foreign princess to fail. It was that this ‘love and affection’ did not permeate into the royal bedroom. As Louis XV might have guessed when trying to banter with his grandson about sex, the future monarch simply did not have the cojones to lead the monarchy safely into the next century.
Surely almost any 15-year-old boy would be more than grateful if his parents (or in this case, grandfather) were so laid-back about sex that they provided the partner and the bed, and said, ‘Enjoy yourself, lad.’ No furtive fumblings in the nightclub toilets for young Louis Auguste. The pubescent, exiled Marie-Antoinette was probably not quite so keen, but her own duty had been drummed into her by her domineering mother, and despite her extreme youth she was consenting. She knew that she was expected to get pregnant as soon as physically possible.
So all the teenage Prince had to do on the night of 16 May 1770 was climb into bed and lose his virginity.
The fact that he didn’t was a source of gossip throughout Versailles the very next morning.
After the second night, courtiers were horrified to find out that he had slept in his own room, leaving his young wife alone. From then on, he would occasionally visit her at bedtime and, as he later confessed to Marie-Antoinette’s brother Joseph, ‘insert his member, stay there without moving for maybe two minutes, then withdraw without ejaculating, still erect, and wish her good evening’.
At first, the gossips put this down to teenage shyness. Even so, Louis XV was anxious enough to ask his doctors to perform a quick inspection of the Prince’s marital equipment. They reported that everything down below looked perfectly normal.
Since sex was a political necessity – an unconsummated marriage could be quickly and legally annulled – the Austrian ambassador to France, a Belgian-born career diplomat called Florimond Claude de Mercy Argenteau (known as Mercy for short), demanded regular updates from the young bride, and kept getting the same reply – Franco-Austrian union had not yet been cemented.
France’s Foreign Minister, the Duc de Choiseul, naturally made it his business to ask for updates. The Spanish ambassador also wrote home about the lack of action in Marie-Antoinette’s bed, which soon became everyone’s favourite subject. Marie-Antoinette’s mother, the Austrian empress Maria Theresa, fired off letters to her daughter encouraging her not to despair – the teenage bride should try ‘caresses and cajoling, but too much hurry would spoil everything’.
Not that Louis Auguste was hurrying with anything except hunting. To improve relations between them, Marie-Antoinette decided to start spending more time with her husband outside the four-poster. She went along to his hunts, without taking part herself, and even handed out food to the hunters, ignoring criticisms that she was acting too much like a servant. And her technique began to work. By sharing the Prince’s hobby, she cajoled him into confiding in her.
It was now July 1770, almost two months after the couple had met for the first time. Louis Auguste confessed to his wife that he was fully aware of his duty, and that he had given himself a deadline to perform it. However, when this deadline passed, he asked for another ‘délai de réflexion’ (which would translate in a modern business contract as a ‘cooling-off period’, the last thing the couple needed).
Ever the dutiful daughter, Marie-Antoinette recorded all the details for her mother in monthly letters, usually scribbling hastily so that her revelations would not lie around on a desk to be read by snoopers. In January 1771 she reported that Louis-Auguste had explained what went wrong on the wedding night: he had resolved to consummate the marriage, but last-minute anxiety had stopped him, and ever since then the fear had grown worse.
It is easy to imagine how embarrassing this must have been for the young Prince and his bride. Being a teenager has never been easy, but belonging to the most famous couple in the country and being a source of national ridicule because you have failed to have sex with your partner must have been unbearable.
Even so, Marie-Antoinette promised her impatient mother that they were growing fonder of each other, and in March of that year, Louis Auguste began spending every night in her bed. On 26 March, they achieved penetration, but again, without ejaculation. We know the details because the Austrian ambassador, the more and more inaccurately named Mercy, described the encounter in his next dispatch to Vienna, presumably after interrogating Marie-Antoinette.
The only compensation for the royal couple in all this sexual humiliation was that the Prince’s younger brother, Louis Stanislas, got married in May 1771, and was an even bigger sexual failure. According to different historians, either he was impotent due to the obesity that would eventually kill him, or he simply found his bride unattractive. By all reports, the Savoyard–Spanish Maria Giuseppina was ugly, dull-witted, and never brushed her teeth. By comparison, Louis Auguste and Marie-Antoinette were universally acknowledged to be handsome, graceful and even touchingly innocent.
In any case, the prospect of Louis Stanislas producing a baby, a rival future heir to the throne, seemed unlikely. But this didn’t stop Marie-Antoinette’s frantic mother hammering away in her letters that Austrian influence in France needed to be sealed with a royal birth.
By the end of October 1772, more than two years after the wedding, Louis XV was finally worried enough to summon the couple to a confessional with Granddad. The ageing King was in his early sixties but still cavorting merrily with Madame du Barry, and must have been completely bemused by his two grandsons’ lack of hormonal activity. Louis Auguste revealed that he had ‘made attempts to consummate his marriage, but was always stopped by painful sensations’. A few days later, Mercy reported to Vienna that Louis XV had personally examined his grandson’s anatomy and found that ‘the very small obstacle is an accident that is very common to adolescents and does not require an operation’ – though the old King was no expert on male members, having devoted all his research to the female body.
Louis Auguste promised to do his duty at the earliest opportunity, but Marie-Antoinette wrote to her mother that he didn’t keep his promise. She was coming to realize that he possessed ‘a nonchalant attitude and laziness that leave him only when he hunts’.
In 1774, when Louis XV died and the young couple became the childless heads of one of Europe’s most powerful dynasties, political panic began to set in. By now, Versailles was buzzing with theories. Some agreed with Marie-Antoinette that her husband was too lazy to have sex; others suggested that his foreskin was too small, and caused pain when he attempted penetration, or that it was stuck to the glans and would not budge at all; another theory was that the skin of his penis was partially attached to his scrotum; gossips even began to spread rumours that Marie-Antoinette must be a lesbian, or that Louis was gay. A poem called ‘Le Godemiché royal’ (‘The Royal Dildo’), officially published in 1789, but reflecting much older ideas, depicted Marie-Antoinette, her skirts lifted, masturbating and lamenting that:
Le bougre porte ailleurs un encens qui m’est dû;
Son vit est mou pour moi et bande pour un cul.
(The bugger takes elsewhere an incense that is my right,
His member is soft for me but hardens for an arse.)
In 1774, the newly crowned Louis XVI consulted doctors, agreed to have an operation, pulled out at the last minute (no pun intended), set a new date for the procedure, but changed his mind yet again. Not surprisingly, Marie-Antoinette despaired, her mother even more so. From being the sweet young couple who were too shy to have sex, they became something of a national joke. A popular song of 1776 went:
Chacun se demande tout bas:
Le roi peut-il? Ne peut-il pas?
(Everyone is whispering the question:
Can the King do it? Or can’t he?)
It was now June 1777, and the sexless marriage was seven years old with not a sexual itch in sight. Maria Theresa of Austria gave up her correspondence course in sex therapy (though few therapists would think that it might help to insult their patient’s attractiveness, seductiveness, intelligence and patriotism like the old Empress had been doing), and sent her eldest son, Joseph (Marie-Antoinette’s big brother), for a hands-on investigation – literally.
Joseph was an inspired choice as a go-between. He himself had been traumatized by a first marriage to a depressive wife who had died of smallpox. He had remarried, but the match had been so loveless that he didn’t even attend his second wife’s funeral when she also succumbed to smallpox. His only daughter had died in 1770. He therefore knew all about the pains of being a royal husband.
Louis XVI seems to have had no complexes about his inadequacy. He confessed to Joseph that he had wet dreams, so he was certain that he could ejaculate, and he described the partial penetrations that he had achieved.
Joseph was pleased by such frankness, but exasperated. He wrote to his younger brother Leopold that ‘he [Louis] is happy, and only does it out of duty because he has no taste for it … Oh, if only I could be present just once! I would sort it out. He needs to be whipped so that he comes, like a donkey.’
Joseph left Versailles at the end of May, exhorting his sister to consider her own responsibility: ‘Are you not cold or distracted when he caresses you? Do you never seem bored, or even repelled?’
According to Madame Campan, Marie-Antoinette ‘became insulted by the indiscreet sincerity’ of her brother, but his frank approach worked miracles, with no need for whipping or an operation. Opinions differ, but there is little proof that Louis XVI’s foreskin went under the surgeon’s knife – there are no descriptions of the procedure, and no gaps in his diary that would suggest convalescence. And two months after his session with Joseph, Louis XVI was joyfully informing his aunts that: ‘I like pleasure a lot, and regret that I did not know it for so long.’ On 30 August 1777, Marie-Antoinette was able to tell her mother: ‘I am enjoying the most essential happiness … The marriage was consummated over a week ago. The exploit was repeated yesterday, even more fully than the first time. I don’t think I am pregnant yet, but at least I can hope to be so soon.’
Typically, the Austrian ambassador was more matter-of-fact, and reported that on Monday, 18 August 1777: ‘The King came to see the Queen when she was getting out of her bath; man and wife stayed together for an hour and a quarter … The royal surgeon Lassonne confirmed that the marriage had been consummated.’
The farce was finally over. The gossip could stop. Or could it?
Louis XVI’s lack of sexual appetite could easily be dismissed as an excuse for prurient tittle-tattle, in the same way that people speculate how the teenaged Catherine Howard (Henry VIII’s number five) coped with the bulk of her aged husband, or enjoy stories of the frisky young Queen Victoria bolting her bedroom door when she first married Prince Albert.
But Louis XVI’s interminable virginity had dire repercussions, and not only because the French royal couple was without a son and heir for several years.
Even though France’s kings were no longer forced to put on armour and lead armies into battle, they had to be real hommes. Almost all of them had official mistresses, and most produced tribes of illegitimate children. Louis XV had pushed things too far by devoting practically all his attention to what went on below the waist, but sexual attractiveness was part of a usual French monarch’s mystique. The idea that a king could bed any woman in France, from a pert young servant to the wife of the noblest aristocrat, cemented his status as head homme. By being a total failure in the bedroom for several critical years at the start of his reign, Louis XVI betrayed an animal weakness. He was sending out the message that he had no authority, even in his own bed. If he had been a lion, he would have been expelled from the pride.
This question of a ruler’s reputation was one that William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, had solved with brutal efficiency – the way he solved every problem. His wife Mathilde was only about 4 feet 4 inches (130 cm) tall, but possessed a fiery temper and was not afraid to stand up to her giant warrior of a husband. On one occasion, however, she provoked a public row. William grabbed her by the hair and dragged her through the streets of the Norman town of Caen. Such domestic violence is of course morally unacceptable, but William clearly realized that he had to show everyone that his manliness, and thereby his authority as a leader, should never be in doubt. Fathering ten children and invading Britain also helped.
Louis XVI, on the other hand, was letting his subjects know that it was OK to doubt his prowess. And people began to say that his poor sexual performance was just one symptom of a more general inadequacy.
Almost everyone who knew the young Louis XVI described him as unremarkable, the kind of youth who would have been ignored if he hadn’t been wearing a crown. He wasn’t exactly ugly, but he was no looker, either. One of his pageboys, a young nobleman called Félix d’Hézecques, wrote in his memoirs that: ‘His face was pleasant, but his teeth, unevenly spaced, made his laugh ungracious.’ The English politician William Wilberforce saw Louis out hunting and called him ‘so strange a being (of the hog kind)’.
In her memoirs, Madame Campan described Louis XVI’s graceless walk, messy hair and melancholic demeanour. She even made an accidental innuendo: ‘His organ, without being hard, was not at all pleasant.’ In fact she was talking about his strident voice.
In a similarly dismissive vein, Marie-Antoinette’s brother Joseph wrote home that his new brother-in-law was: ‘A bit weak though not stupid. He has opinions and judgement, but he is apathetic in body and mind.’ It seems that poor Louis had nothing going for him except the accident of birth that made him heir to the throne.
Even in his own family, as a teenager he was compared unfavourably to his younger brother, Louis Stanislas, an obese but self-confident wit with a cruel tongue, and his cousin, Louis Philippe, who had inherited their grandfather Louis XV’s dashing good looks and sexual appetite. Louis Philippe, for example, bedded his 16-year-old wife Louise Marie immediately, and then set about creating a reputation as a serial adulterer – much more like an old-school French monarch (though he would later side with the revolutionaries to save his own head, and even vote in parliament to guillotine Louis XVI).
The most frequent comparisons, however, were with Louis XVI’s youngest brother, Charles, who produced a son and a daughter before Louis had even started sleeping with Marie-Antoinette. Charles’s obvious willingness to do his royal duty got the satirists dunking their quills in their inkwells. In 1779, an anonymous pamphlet appeared, Les Amours de Charlot et Toinette (The Loves of Charlie and Toinette). It was a 155-line erotic poem, purportedly ‘stolen from V …’ (that is, Versailles), which describes how the Queen has got fed up with waiting for ‘her husband, the bad fucker’ (‘mauvais fouteur’), ‘whose match-stick is no bigger than a straw, always soft and always bent’. She therefore turns for consolation to Charles, whose ‘member is a poker’ and who lays her on a velvet sofa and sets her ‘pretty nipples trembling’. It is a vulgar piece of soft porn, and surprisingly forgiving, because the author ends on a philosophical thought:
Quand on nous parle de vertu,
C’est souvent par envie;
Car enfin serions-nous en vie,
Si nos pères n’eussent foutu.
(When one talks about virtue,
It’s often out of envy,
Because would we be alive
If our fathers hadn’t fucked?)
Despite this apparent forgiveness, though, the poem shows how, even after Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette had produced a child together, people were freely joking about the King’s lack of sexual appetite.
As a young married man, Louis XVI seems to have other things on his mind. He has gone down in history as what would nowadays be called a nerd. He had his grandfather’s gaming room turned into a library (he was an avid reader, especially of books on geography and history), and set up workshops in his apartments where he would carry out all sorts of mechanical experiments. He even had a forge installed in the palace, no doubt provoking comment to the effect that instead of hammering at lumps of metal, he should have been turning his energies to lewder sorts of banging.
During the period when everyone at Versailles was trying to cajole the Prince into having sex, Mercy, the Austrian ambassador, said exactly this, albeit more elegantly. He wrote to Marie-Antoinette’s mother in despair that:
All the influence she [Marie-Antoinette] has over him has not been able to distract this young Prince from his extraordinary taste for everything to do with building work, such as masonry, carpentry and similar things … He works alongside the labourers, shifting materials, beams, and paving stones, spending hours on this tiresome exercise … We must try to lure him away from this with the promise of more pleasant, suitable activities.
When he became king, Louis XVI transferred his love of manual work to even more obsessive pursuits, and would spend hours building clocks and combination locks. While still a prince, he studied with the country’s best locksmiths and makers of decorative ironwork. The writer Jean-Louis Giraud-Soulavie, a virulent anti-royalist usually known as the Abbé de Soulavie, visited Louis XVI’s (abandoned) apartments at Versailles in 1792 and found: ‘above the King’s private library, a forge, two anvils, a thousand iron tools, various ordinary locks, but delicate and perfectly made, as well as secret locks and others decorated in gilded copper’. These were probably made by Louis XVI himself.
Louis also took lessons from a master clockmaker, Pierre Le Roy (whom he put on a regular salary), learning how to create and assemble the tiny components necessary to build beautiful timepieces. In 1890 a clock was sold at auction in London for £30,000 (a vast sum, equivalent to 50 times the annual living expenses for a well-off middle-class family at the time). It was listed as a wedding present made for the Fitzwilliam family by Louis XVI.
All this points to much more than a hobby. If Louis had been allowed to survive the Revolution, he could have earned a decent living making padlocks, repairing watches or tiling bathrooms.
To be fair, though, this nerdish taste for manual work was a sign of modernity. It was the writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 1762 treatise on education, Émile, who suggested that children (boys, anyway) of the privileged classes should learn ‘a purely mechanical art in which the hands work more than the head’. Rousseau saw this as a means of bringing about social awareness. Émile is told:
It is less about learning a craft than overcoming the prejudices against crafts … You will never have to work to earn a living … but no matter, don’t work out of necessity, work for the glory of it. Lower yourself to the status of a craftsman in order to rise above your own status.
In the later eighteenth century, the whole French royal family was educated along these lines. King Louis-Philippe, the son of Louis XVI’s cousin also called Louis Philippe (though without the hyphen), would later write in his memoirs that the education he received from his governess Madame de Genlis ‘was very democratic, like the century, and became more so as the Revolution approached’. He complained that ‘Madame de Genlis put the blame on Rousseau and followed his system, meaning that she was obliged to make me plane wood so that, like Émile, I became a carpenter.’
In other words, Louis XVI’s talent for building complex machines was the result of his grandfather Louis XV’s wish that his male heirs should embrace modern philosophical ideas about some measure of social equality, and therefore needed to learn respect for manual labour.
Despite his modernity, Louis XVI had one obsession that marked him out as an old-school royal. This was hunting. When he wasn’t building locks and clocks, he was out in the forest massacring wildlife.
Regular hunting was what set the upper classes apart from everyone else, just as it did at the same time in England. Hunting in France was still governed by tradition – with a few exceptions for government ministers and high-ranking military officers, only people who could prove their nobility going back to 1400 were allowed to join the royal hunt, or even follow along in a carriage.
Louis XVI started riding to hounds when he was 15, mainly in pursuit of wild boar and stags. As a teenager, he was free to hunt whenever he wanted. In October 1772, for example, he went on 14 stag hunts, 2 wild boar hunts and 6 shoots. That came to 22 days out of a possible 31, often a long way from Versailles, in the royal forests of Rambouillet, Fontainebleau and Saint-Germain. Later, as king, he cut this down to about two hunts a week, but they were still the highlights in his calendar.
Hunting was one area in which Louis displayed what were seen at the time as manly, and truly royal, qualities. Félix d’Hézecques, the former pageboy, tells a story about one of the gardeners at Versailles, a Swiss man who owned an immense, heavy musket. Louis XVI heard about the weapon and went to try it out. Félix wrote that: ‘Taking the rifle, he [the King] lifted it effortlessly to his shoulder and fired, without being in the slightest overbalanced by the report. Despite his bad eyesight, he was an accurate shot.’
Louis XVI seems to have felt like one of the lads when he was out hunting. His shyness disappeared and he let himself go. When he got back home, his post-hunt suppers would be lively occasions when he would gleefully buttonhole some unfortunate aristo and describe the thrill of the chase. Joseph-François-Régis de Séguret, one of Louis XVI’s valets, gave a comic description of one such supper in his memoirs:
The conversation didn’t finish until the King had transported the listener to all the places that the stag had taken him, named the villages and farms he had been to, the rivers he crossed and how he crossed them, described all the tricks the animal tried in its attempt to shake off the hounds, recalled the difficulties of the terrain, etc….
The boar hunts sometimes ended in the animal being driven into a pen where it would be stabbed to death with lances, either by Louis XVI himself or a lucky hunter nominated by him to do the honours.
After such a physically and emotionally charged day, it is hardly surprising that often, come bedtime, Louis would just flop on to his mattress and pass out.
In short, as far as his own reputation and the dynastic future of the monarchy were concerned, Louis XVI managed to turn even hunting, the most macho and most royal of pastimes, into sexual-avoidance behaviour.
It was also his attitude to hunting that gave written proof to what is often quoted as Louis XVI’s most serious character fault – his apparent lack of passion about almost anything except his hobbies.
The most commonly cited evidence for this is an infamous diary entry on 14 July 1789 that is taken as a clear sign of his detachment from everyday life in France. He wrote ‘Rien’ – ‘Nothing’. The Bastille, the prison where people were held by royal warrant, was stormed, its governor lynched, and armed mobs ruled the streets of Paris, but to the King this counted for ‘nothing’. It was a ‘rien’ that he would come to regret.
In fact, though, this ‘rien’ simply meant that Louis had killed no animals that day. Whatever ceremony he attended, whichever noteworthy person visited him, whoever at court was promoted or died, he would always make a note in his diary of that day’s hunting. Details of his kills were recorded with the same meticulous attention he gave to his clockmaking, and at the end of each year he had the dates and numbers copied out by a calligrapher, framed, and hung on the staircase leading up to his library.
His hunting entries are almost enthusiastic – on 6 October 1775, he wrote: ‘Shoot on the plain of Créteil, 282 kills.’ By contrast, on the day he first met Marie-Antoinette, the young girl sent from Austria to warm up his bed, his only comment in the diary was a blunt: ‘Met Madame la Dauphine.’ When a long-serving minister of state died, he noted: ‘Nothing, death of M. Maurepas at 2.30 in the morning.’ On 6 October 1789, when Louis had been taken by force to Paris and was being held captive in the Tuileries palace by armed renegades, he wrote only: ‘Rien, my aunts came to dinner.’
Perhaps he was showing reserve; perhaps he didn’t have much spare time for writing (though he always managed to tot up his annual score of hunting kills); maybe he didn’t think it necessary to keep a personal record of the major events in his life when a king’s every move is chronicled by courtiers and historians. But what the diary seems to suggest most of all is someone who is a passenger in almost all aspects of his life, a passive observer of anything that doesn’t involve chasing after animals.
The problem for the French monarchy was that this is not the kind of leader that a regime needs when it is being challenged. Napoleon Bonaparte, who was willing to cross continents and sacrifice whole armies to defend his authority, gave a typically Napoleonic analysis of Louis XVI’s character:
At another time, he would have been an excellent king, but he was worthless during a revolution. He lacked resolution and firmness … In his place, I would have got on my horse, and, making a few concessions on one side, and giving a few cracks of the whip on the other, I would have restored order.
If the revolutionaries had been stags or wild boar, maybe Louis XVI would have brought them to heel. As it was, France now had a king who, when the political terrain became difficult, would let his opponents outrun him.
Nevertheless, by all accounts Louis XVI was not the indifferent tyrant that the revolutionaries would later make him out to be. Yes, he was rich, privileged and out of touch, but he was a benevolent human being – sometimes too much so. Félix d’Hézecques describes in his memoirs how one day:
Louis XVI, returning from the hunt on the road to Saint-Cyr [near Versailles], met a poor deserter who was being taken back to his regiment for punishment. The soldier … dropped to his knees and, holding out his arms towards the King, begged for clemency. The monarch immediately ordered the officer of his guards to have the letters of pardon sent out. For the rest of the day, the King’s cheerfulness showed how satisfied he was to have exercised this royal prerogative.
After this, Félix d’Hézecques says that Louis XVI was kept away from processions of galley slaves being marched to Brest, for fear that he would free them all.
In general, however, this royal compassion was well received. The Maréchal de Richelieu,fn3 an old friend of the previous king, said that earlier generations of the royal family had loved ‘paintings and war … King Louis XVI is different: he loves the people.’
Marie-Antoinette’s brother Joseph, a worldly-wise man, told Louis that he should get out amongst his people and show his affection – or at least his respect – for them. Madame Campan reported in her memoirs that Joseph ‘said in our presence that he [Louis] should not only know everything there is in Paris, but that he should travel everywhere, and reside a few days in every large city in France’. Sadly, the advice went unheeded.
Today, the British royal family has learnt that shaking a few hands, smiling for the crowds and showing interest in an exhibition of local vegetables does wonders for the popularity of a monarchy. Before the Revolution brought Louis XVI into enforced contact with his people, he wasn’t that kind of monarch, and it was to cost him dear.