CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
EPILOGUE
“This prison can now serve as the laboratory of a new experience; to look without passion at the symbols of murders long past.”
NOTICE TODAY IN THE CONCIERGERIE
The journey—that journey which had begun in an imperial palace in Vienna and finished in a squalid cell in Paris—was completed. The body of Marie Antoinette with its severed head was taken unceremoniously to the graveyard off the rue d’Anjou, where Louis XVI had been interred nine and a half months previously. The people who had been crushed to death in the fireworks episode following the Dauphine’s marriage had been buried there, as were, many years later, some of the Swiss Guards who died in the attack on the Tuileries. Now carts bearing fresh victims went to the rue d’Anjou every day.1
The gravediggers took time off to have their lunch, leaving the head and body on the grass unattended. This meant that the future Madame Tussaud was able to sculpt the Queen’s lifeless face in wax; unlike her impression of the Princesse de Lamballe, however, this model was never exhibited. Two weeks later the bill for the interment came in: for the coffin six livres, for grave and gravediggers fifteen livres and thirty-five sous.2
Back at the Conciergerie, the effects of “the Widow Capet” were listed. They were pitiful compared to the elaborate belongings that would be left by Philippe Égalité, ci-devant Duc d’Orléans, executed on 6 November. “I vote for death,” shouted the derisive crowd as he passed, imitating the words with which he had condemned Louis XVI. Égalité died as he had lived, a rich man, going to the scaffold “heavily powdered” and elegant, leaving behind waistcoats with silver buttons, breeches, cravats, dressing-gowns, sets of silver plate and a magnificent picnic basket. Everything that Marie Antoinette left was very plain: a few linen chemises and corsets in fine toile as well as some “linge à blanchir,” two pairs of black stockings, a lawn headdress, some black crepe, some batiste handkerchiefs, garters and two pairs of cotton “pockets” which she used to carry her belongings inside her dress. She also left a box of powder, a “big fine sponge” and a little box of pomade—the single last remnants of a toilette that in all its pomp had once preoccupied the whole of Versailles.3
These remains were distributed, according to custom, among the women prisoners of the Salpêtrière prison. Four years later those other objects that had been seized at the Temple and produced for trial were put up for auction. They included a small green morocco case for sewing things, and three little portraits in green shagreen cases. They raised a total of ten francs, fifteen centimes; everything else had been stolen.4
Public reaction in France to the death of the former Queen was ecstatic. Numerous congratulatory petitions were received by the Revolutionary Tribunal along these lines: “It is fallen at last, the head of the haughty Austrian woman gorged with the blood of the people . . .”; “the execrable head of the Messalina Marie Antoinette . . .”; “Here is the second royal monster laid low . . .”; “The soil of France is purged of this pestilential couple . . .” A note of variety was struck by the District of Josselin, Department of Morbihan, which mentioned Marie Thérèse as being her mother’s “living portrait” and in character too; as for the boy, the teeth of the wolf-cub should be pulled out as soon as possible.
A Jacobin club in Angoulême made an outing to the foot of a so-called Tree of Liberty (these trees were popular symbols of the Revolution) “to give thanks to the divinity that has rid us of this fury.” A choir then sang “a sacred song”; it was the “Marsellaise.” Marie Antoinette au Diable expressed the general theme of the pamphlets, whose voices were not stilled by her death. The former Queen had now claimed her place in hell, where she expected to find her mother and her two Emperor brothers, but “as for my fat porpoise of a husband,” that crass drunkard, “I want to have nothing more to do with him.”5
But as the news spread in the prisons of Marie Antoinette’s “greatness and courage” at the last, royalists there took comfort. Grace Elliott in Sainte Pélagie prison wrote of how they were all inspired by her example and hoped to follow it when the time came. Unfortunately the poor Comtesse Du Barry found herself unable to do so. The royal mistress, still beautiful at fifty, whiled her time away sitting on Grace Elliott’s bed and telling her anecdotes of Louis XV and his court.6 But when her time came to mount the scaffold, all composure deserted her. The Du Barry desperately but vainly tried to avoid her fate; she had, after all, been trained to give pleasure, not to die.
Outside, the royalist world tried to accommodate itself to the tragedy. The Duchesse de Polignac died shortly afterwards of what was generally believed to be a broken heart but was probably cancer accelerated by suffering. Her health had given way when the King was killed, her daughter had told Madame Vigée Le Brun, but at the news about the Queen, “her charming face became quite altered and one could see death written there.” To Count Mercy d’Argenteau, however, in Brussels, the horrifying death was inevitably linked to the name of the Empress he had once served; his first reaction was nothing to do with Marie Antoinette but simple shock at seeing “the blood of the great Maria Teresa shed upon the scaffold.”7
Fersen, also in Brussels, received the news on 20 October. For a while he felt quite numb, while Brussels society regarded him with silent and respectful pity. After that he kept 16 October—“this atrocious day”—as a day of mourning for the rest of his life, for her who had been, as he told Lady Elizabeth Foster on 22 October, “the model of queens and of women.” He was left with an ideal in his heart; memories of her sweetness, tenderness, goodness, her loving nature, her sensibility flooded over him in his correspondence with his sister. He told Sophie that Eléanore Sullivan could never replace Marie Antoinette—“Elle”—in his heart.8
He did not know that his end, seventeen years after that of his heroine, was to be equally, if not more, violent than hers. The Count incurred the enmity of the Swedish crowd who were incited to believe that he had poisoned Christian, the heir to the throne of Denmark. At the funeral procession on 20 June 1810—an ill-omened date—Fersen was set upon and torn to pieces, a fate that had been so often predicted for Marie Antoinette. He had never been repaid the prodigious sums that he had dispensed trying to save the King and Queen, his claim being shunted from royal to royal despite clear letters of proof.9
Maria Carolina, in Naples, was devastated in spite of her premonitions of disaster. Amélie, one of her string of daughters (like her mother, Maria Carolina had a vast family), always remembered being told of her aunt’s death. The Queen took them all into the chapel to attend Mass and pray for Marie Antoinette. Amélie was then eleven and had already shed a few tears for the death of the first Dauphin whom she had fancied she might marry—they were of an age—and thus become Queen of France. Many years later, the unmarried Amélie fastened her affections on Louis Philippe, Duc d’Orléans since the death of Philippe Égalité. Maria Carolina had even tried to stop herself speaking French, so great was her horror of the people who had caused her sister’s death, although in fact the habit turned out to be too strong.10 Now she had to grit her teeth and accept that the twenty-eight-year-old Amélie would marry the son of the man who had voted for Louis XVI’s death warrant—or no one.
In the end she accepted the suitor, by now stout and “very Bourbon-looking,” on condition that he spoke frankly to her about the past: “I forgive you everything on condition that I know everything.” In this way Amélie became Queen of the French after 1830 when Louis Philippe displaced the Comte d’Artois, Louis XVI’s last surviving brother, as monarch and took this title. As an old lady Queen Amélie would say that she believed it had always been her destiny to occupy the throne of France. Maria Carolina was left with the consolation that everyone recognized the deep affection that Marie Antoinette had borne her. “My mother often spoke of you,” wrote Marie Thérèse. “She loved you more than all her other sisters.”*11511
There were many others for whom October would always be the month of “sad memories,” in the words of the Princesse de Tarante, and the 16th a day of solemn mourning “when I cannot speak of anything but Her.”12 Two people, however, who did not know of the Queen’s death—they did not believe the criers outside the Temple—were her daughter Marie Thérèse and her sister-in-law Madame Elisabeth. The latter only discovered shortly before her own execution in May 1794. Marie Thérèse, by now quite alone in the secluded prison, lived on in ignorance, a sad, abandoned and as it seemed, a forgotten figure.
She did not see her brother again before his death on 8 June 1795 at the age of ten. The cause was almost certainly the tuberculosis that had killed the first Dauphin, in this case exacerbated by conditions that were at best neglectful, at worst brutal. Since all the cosseting in the world and the fresh air of Meudon had not saved Louis Joseph from his pathetic fate, perhaps Louis Charles too was destined for an early death. Nevertheless what is known about his treatment indicated a level of callous indifference, the sins of the father (and the mother) being visited upon the child.
The announcement of the boy’s death meant that the Comte de Provence in exile was at last free to claim the title of King of France. As Louis XVIII, he ascended a throne, he wrote, “stained with the blood of my family.”13 Since the new King was childless, the heir in the next generation was the twenty-year-old Duc d’Angoulême, son of the Comte d’Artois, the boy whose birth had caused Marie Antoinette such anguish in the days before her own marriage was consummated. Negotiations to free Marie Thérèse in exchange for revolutionary prisoners in Austria succeeded in December 1795 when she was just seventeen. There was then a brief squabble between Habsburgs and Bourbons over a suitable bridegroom among her first cousins for the “orphan of the Temple,” the sole surviving descendant of the martyred King. Louis XVIII won; the claims of the Duc d’Angoulême were preferred over those of the Archduke Charles, brother of the Emperor Francis II. Marie Thérèse became Duchesse d’Angoulême, but as a “Child of France”—a King’s daughter—her rank remained superior to that of her husband, a mere King’s nephew.
Marie Thérèse enjoyed neither a happy marriage nor a happy life. The marriage was probably not consummated—in a strange echo of her mother’s early years in France—and was certainly childless. There are thus no descendants of Marie Antoinette alive today. When she returned from exile at her uncle’s side in 1814, the Duchesse d’Angoulême was received with sympathetic acclaim by the crowds, who had been brought up on the story of her sufferings. They saw an unappealing, red-faced woman with bad teeth, rather masculine-looking, who regarded them with ill-concealed loathing. She “carried her head high like her mother” but lacked the softening grace; her voice was notably harsh.14 The death of Louis XVIII in 1824 and the accession of Angoulême’s father Artois as Charles X meant that for the six years of his reign Marie Thérèse enjoyed that title made famous by her mother, “Madame la Dauphine.”
The abdication of Charles X in 1830 brought a further change of title for Marie Thérèse, at least in the opinion of devoted royalists. For just a few moments, the time it took his son to sign a second instrument of abdication, the former Duc d’Angoulême could be argued to have been King of France. In the years that followed, some well-wishers called Marie Thérèse “Majesté” on the grounds that she was the last Queen of France (both the Comtesses de Provence and Artois had died—in 1810 and 1805 respectively). In principle, however, Marie Thérèse ended her life as her mother had begun hers, as “Madame la Dauphine.”
It was not a happy life but in exile it was a long one. Marie Thérèse lived on until October 1851, when she was seventy-three, and died nearly sixty years after the execution of her mother. Her places of exile included Edinburgh and Prague, although she died at Frohsdorf near Vienna. In her own last testament she forgave “with all my heart” those who had injured her, “following the example” of both her parents. No doubt she did forgive her enemies. But it is to be doubted whether this sad, bitter, deeply conservative figure, obstinately old-fashioned—her dress was the despair of the Comtesse de Boigne—really had much forgiveness in her heart for what life had done to her.15
One of the problems that plagued Marie Thérèse and undoubtedly caused her much pain was the appearance of numbers of “false Dauphins,” at least forty of them, during the nineteenth century. It could not be easily accepted that Louis Charles had died in the Temple although recent DNA research has led to the conclusion that he did. This investigation was able to be made since one of the doctors who performed the autopsy on the boy’s corpse took away his heart secretly; after a strange odyssey of thefts and recoveries, the heart came to rest in a crystal urn in Saint-Denis. Mitochondrial DNA testing, which concentrates on the scraps of genetic material found in the maternal line of descent, was done in two separate laboratories in Belgium and Germany; an announcement was made in April 2000 that the sequences were “identical” with those of Marie Antoinette, two of her sisters and two living relatives on the maternal side.*116 “Science has come to the rescue of history,” said a representative of the Spanish Bourbon royal line, the Duc d’Anjou, at the press conference.16
Some of the nineteenth-century stories of “false Dauphins,” who made their claims before science had performed its useful service to history, have a colourful flavour. There was, for example, the Frenchman Pierre Louis Poiret who ended up in the Seychelles archipelago; he had apparently been cared for by a cobbler called Poiret after being smuggled out of the Temple. His numerous descendants were given suitably Bourbon names including Louis Charles and Marie Antoinette. In the opposite hemisphere, a man known as “Indian Williams” gave interviews in support of his claim. The son of Eunice Williams, kidnapped by a tribe of Native Americans, with a Native American father, “Indian Williams” pointed to the fact that there was no record of his birth among the family records; he was, however, finally unmasked by Mark Twain among others.17 But to Marie Thérèse, the romance of such implausible notions hardly appealed. Troubled as she might be by the claimants, for her, Louis Charles remained the brother who had so wickedly traduced their mother.
When Marie Thérèse first returned to France, she was escorted to the site of her parents’ graves by Pauline de Tourzel, by now Comtesse de Béarn. It was seven o’clock in the morning and the Duchesse d’Angoulême wore an inconspicuous dress, with a veil over her hat. The ladies were conducted by Pierre Louis Desclozeaux, an old lawyer who lived at 48 rue d’Anjou with his son-in-law; he remembered the two interments and had subsequently tended the sites. When the cemetery was closed in 1794—one of the last to be buried there was Jacques Hébert on 24 March—Desclozeaux made a garden out of the area, planting two weeping willows as a commemoration. Shown the place, Marie Thérèse trembled, fell on her knees and then prayed for the happiness of France—that prayer so frequently on both her parents’ lips.18
The testimony of this good man—Desclozeaux’s “religious care” would be commemorated on his own tombstone—was important when the two royal bodies came to be exhumed, starting on 18 January 1815. The Queen’s body was discovered first, deteriorated to a heap of bones, but with the head entire. According to Chateaubriand, who was a member of the party of inspection, it was recognizable by the special shape of the Queen’s mouth, recalling that dazzling smile she had given him at Versailles on 30 June 1789. More prosaically, some of her hair and the two elastic garters that she wore to her execution were found, perfectly preserved. The Prince de Poix, in service right up to 10 August 1792, fell fainting backwards at the sight of these relics. The next morning the relics of Louis XVI were recovered.19
The remains of both King and Queen were held briefly at the house in the rue d’Anjou and prayers were said before they were sealed up in new coffins with appropriate inscriptions concerning the majesty and titles of the occupants. On 21 January 1815 there was a procession to the cathedral of Saint Denis; it was the twenty-second anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI. This was the traditional resting-place of the Bourbon dynasty—where the Dauphin Louis Joseph had been interred, for example, in 1789—but it had been horribly pillaged during the Revolution. The caveau (vault) of the Bourbons was now to be restored to due dignity.
In the main body of the cathedral today there is an idealized sculpture of the royal couple at prayer commissioned by the restored King. The crowned Louis XVI on his prie-dieu looks up to heaven, noble, even handsome, as though “the son of St. Louis” is indeed ready to ascend. Marie Antoinette, sculpted in décolleté and high-waisted gown of a later period, in necklace and earrings and wearing a long lace headdress, kneels submissively at his side with her eyes cast down. Below in the vault itself, the black marble tomb of Marie Antoinette, lying amid those of other Bourbons, enjoys a kind of last captivity behind bars ornamented with the fleurs-de-lys of France. In contrast to that of the Habsburg crypt in Vienna, the atmosphere of the caveau of the Bourbons is chilly and silent, and there are no flowers.
Two chapelles expiatoires were erected at the orders of Louis XVIII. One, designed as a classical mausoleum, marked the site where the royal remains were originally interred. It lies in the “Square Louis XVI” as it is now termed, a pleasant green space off the Boulevard Haussmann. Inside are two marble groups, one depicting Louis XVI and the Abbé Edgeworth by Bosio, and one “Marie Antoinette supported by Religion” by Courtot; the face of Religion has a strong resemblance to Madame Elisabeth. The second commemorative chapel, extensively restored in 1989, was erected at the Conciergerie, with altars and black velvet curtains heavily fringed in silver; the names of the three royal martyrs, Louis XVI and Madame Elisabeth as well as Marie Antoinette, are recorded, and there are paintings depicting such scenes as “The Queen in the Conciergerie receiving the Succour of Religion,” “The Queen waiting to be conducted to the Conciergerie” and “The Queen’s Last Communion.”
“I will never be happy here. I can feel the Queen’s ghost asking what I am doing in her bed.” Thus spoke Josephine, wife of the then First Consul Napoleon when he decided to move into the Tuileries in 1800. One can understand her dread; it was a palace still marked with the bloodstains from the Swiss Guards murdered there eight years previously. Did Napoleon placate the ghost of Marie Antoinette by studying and copying the marriage ceremonies of 1770 when he married another Archduchess of Austria in 1810? But the new Empress of France, Marie Louise, never felt completely at home in a country where the people had killed her great-aunt.20
Certainly the Queen’s ghost has walked in the 200-odd years since her death—literally so, in the belief of some. The most celebrated and also the most controversial sighting is that by two English ladies, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, who were lost in the grounds of Versailles on 10 August 1901. Their account of seeing a beautiful fair-haired lady in an old-fashioned dress with some companions in the grounds of the palace was published ten years later under the title An Adventure. Given the fatal date of 10 August, the Misses Moberly and Jourdain came to the conclusion that they had somehow entered the reveries of the Queen while at the National Assembly on that date in 1792, looking back on her life at Versailles, coupled with the events of 5 October 1789 when she was brought news of the march of the market-women from Paris.
Various explanations have been put forward for this episode involving two eminently respectable “donnish” women, in turn Principals of St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. Did the Misses Moberly and Jourdain see some real people—possibly actors—and trick them out with false memories? Perhaps they were influenced by the case of the medium Hélène Smith, which was discussed in a book published shortly before their own experience. Smith’s spirit control was Cagliostro, who was allegedly madly in love with Marie Antoinette; as a result Smith was “reincarnated” as the Queen in trances over several years. Recently, however, it has been suggested that there was some kind of emotional subtext to the women’s adventure; since Moberly and Jourdain hardly knew each other in 1901, “the vision of Marie Antoinette in some way . . . made possible Moberly and Jourdain’s lifelong homoerotic attachment.”*11721
The idea of Marie Antoinette as a tribade—the eighteenth-century word for a female homosexual, based on the Greek word for friction—was sedulously preached at the time in lewd pamphlets as a means of abuse. But it has meant that her name, generally coupled with that of the Lamballe, has been entered more pleasantly in homosexual annals as worthy of honour. Marie Antoinette and the Lamballe rated a mention in Radclyffe Hall’s novel of 1928, The Well of Loneliness, originally banned for its openly lesbian theme.22 The poet of homosexuality, Jean Genet, was fascinated by the story of Marie Antoinette. She was one of the four women in history who interested him, as he once told a friend, the others being the Virgin Mary, Joan of Arc and Madame Curie. A foundling himself, he derived inspiration from the fact that Genet had been the maiden name of Marie Antoinette’s favoured First Lady of the Bedchamber. It was indeed the story of Marie Antoinette’s execution that was acted out by the eponymous characters in his 1947 play The Maids as part of their elaborate fantasies.
In modern terms, therefore, Marie Antoinette has become a gay icon. Whether or not the Queen was actually a tribade in the full sense of the word—it has been suggested here that her early feelings for the Lamballe and her intense attachment to the Polignac were more emotional than physical—this respect makes up for the coarse insults of her own time.
This is paralleled by the attachment that many romantically minded crowned heads have had to the memory of the unfortunate Queen. Ludwig of Bavaria made Lindenhof, his favourite place, a replica of the Trianon. The Empress Eugénie, with no connection except that of rank, devoted herself to recovering some of Marie Antoinette’s possessions for the Great Exhibition of 1867. From the point of view of hindsight, however, by far the most compelling attachment is that of Alexandra, the last Tsarina of Russia.*118 She had Marie Antoinette’s picture on her desk in the Winter Palace. There was a Gobelin tapestry of the Queen and her children, after the family portrait by Madame Vigée Le Brun, presented by the President of France, in the Tsarina’s corner drawing room at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Seloe.23
Reopened as a museum in 1997, the Alexander Palace now has the tapestry restored to its former position. The official explanatory booklet states: “This idyllic world was watched over by the sad and prophetic smile of Marie Antoinette of France . . . Alexandra and the children may well have met Marie Antoinette’s gaze as they left the palace for good at dawn on 1 August 1917.” The “sad and prophetic” gaze of Marie Antoinette had already had an opportunity to look down on the Tsarina. In 1896, on a state visit to France, Alexandra was given Marie Antoinette’s room in Versailles. She personally was delighted, but the arrangement was greeted with “suppressed horror” by her entourage who found the association “ominous.”24
A notice in the Conciergerie today adjures the visitor: “This prison can now serve as the laboratory of a new experience; to look without passion at the symbols of murders long past.” Looking without passion is always a good plan where history is concerned. But is it really possible with regard to the career and character of Marie Antoinette? The two-hundredth anniversary of her birth in 1955 was marked by an eminent exhibition at Versailles. Apart from pictures and sculpture, furniture and jewellery, its memorabilia included a corsage with the arms of the Dauphine embroidered on it, fragments of pink satin embroidered with jasmine, a white footbath garlanded with flowers and ornamented with illustrations of Aesop’s fables, a pair of blue Chinese parrots once in her room at Versailles—and black silk stockings and garters such as she wore at her execution. Yet the British novelist and historian Nancy Mitford, herself the admiring author of a biography of the Pompadour, was moved to deliver a diatribe on the subject in the London Times. Marie Antoinette she considered “frivolous without being funny” and a woman of “monumental stupidity.”25
The year 1993, marking the two-hundredth anniversary of the Queen’s death, found a gathering at the site where she was guillotined at the Place du Carrousel, at the corner of the Place de la Concorde, which included descendants of the faithful aristocrats; an actress from the Comédie Française read the Queen’s last letter to Madame Elisabeth. But an interactive play put on around the anniversary, Je m’appellais Marie Antoinette, by André Castelot and Alain Decaux and produced by Robert Hossein, allowed the audience to vote on her fate, with the options of liberty, lifetime imprisonment—or execution. Although the majority voted, on the evidence given, for banishment, some still voted for execution. Marie Antoinette, who was recently estimated to be, with Napoleon, “the most famous figure in the entire length and breadth of French history from Joan of Arc to Charles de Gaulle,” continues to have her passionate admirers and her equally vehement detractors.26
Undoubtedly it is the death of Marie Antoinette that casts a glow of nobility over her life story. Some of her admirers understood this from the first, such as Horace Walpole who had once hailed her as Virgil’s “true goddess.” He reflected “coolly” for three days before writing on the subject to his friend Mary Berry and then pronounced: “Mine is not grief now. No, it is all admiration and enthusiasm!” The last days of “that unparalleled Princess” with not one friend to comfort her were so superior to any death ever exhibited or recorded that he would not choose to revive her even if he could—unless of course she could be restored to a true happiness that would include her children. “Let history or legend produce a similar model.”27
Certainly the “greatness” at the end for which Marie Antoinette was much praised was true enough. “Unhappy Queen! What courage and what firmness she has shown!” exclaimed Madame Adélaïde in September 1793—the very aunt who had spoken so dismissively of l’Autrichienne twenty-three years earlier. “How has she talked to all these villains! . . . If only everything had depended on her!”28
Let it be remembered, however, that this constancy was not a virtue that she exhibited on one solitary occasion in October 1793. On the contrary, Marie Antoinette faced a remarkable, even horrifying, tally of potentially violent assaults between 5 October 1789 and her death four years later. The howling invasion of Versailles, the events at the Tuileries of 20 June when she had to hide and the still more awful ones of 10 August, followed by the threats to her personally in the Tower during the September Massacres, as the crowd exhibiting the head of the Princesse de Lamballe wanted to acquire “the head of Antoinette” as well; these were simply the most salient episodes. They leave out of the account other occurrences that were merely deeply unpleasant, such as the mobbing of the carriages intended for Saint Cloud and the slow torture of the return from Varennes, to say nothing of the gross, often maniacal threats to her person to which she had to listen almost daily—with the hope but not the absolute assurance that the words were empty.
On all these occasions Marie Antoinette experienced extreme fear, as we know from her private communications, quite apart from her dread on behalf of her children (and husband). Yet never at any time did she exhibit her distress publicly; her composure was so sublime as to be interpreted as contempt by her enemies until finally Hébert in Le Père Duchesne resorted to calling it the serenity of a habitual criminal. Courage like that did not come out of the blue. Nor could it be simply inherited, with due respect to those who casually attributed Marie Antoinette’s bravery to the fact that she was the daughter of the great Maria Teresa. The Empress of Austria died in her bed at the age of sixty-three, surrounded by her family and servants, a very different, lonely fate being reserved for the Queen of France.
But a death, however noble, can never be the whole picture. The last weeks of Marie Antoinette’s life also drew attention to the remarkable intelligence with which she faced her accusers. Her friend Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, writing to her mother two weeks after the Queen’s death, commented on this, how “her answers, her cleverness, and greatness of mind” blazed forth in double splendour in view of her circumstances. The “horror of making the child appear against her was what one should have hoped the mind of man incapable of,” added the Duchess. The Princesse de Tarante wondered that the Queen did not quote Julius Caesar’s words, “Et tu, Brute,” regarding her son: “Et toi aussi.”29 Yet it was this dreadful accusation that gave the Queen her opportunity for a superb reply: “Is there a mother amongst you . . .” This instinctive intelligence, confounding those who routinely refer to her as “vapid” and “feather-brained,” leads one to the crucial consideration where a biographical study is concerned. Given that her trial was a travesty, given that her treatment was inhuman, did Marie Antoinette nevertheless contribute to her own downfall?
In one important sense, Marie Antoinette was a victim from birth. That is to say, she was the victim of her mother’s matrimonial alliances and the diplomatic ventures of the King of France. And princesses were of course “born to obey,” as Maria Teresa believed. Marie Antoinette was certainly not exceptional among the “daughters of a great Prince” to be from birth “the slave of other people’s prejudices . . . a sacrifice to the supposed public good”—Isabella of Parma’s words. Hers was an uncommon story but it did not begin with an uncommon situation. Where she was exceptionally unlucky was to be shunted off to France in order to cement a Habsburg-Bourbon treaty, entered into after the Seven Years’ War, which reversed traditional alliances. Yet this treaty was purely one of convenience for the great ones involved; it carried with it neither the hearts nor the minds of the French court. She was, after all, l’Autrichienne long before she appeared in France.
The political significance of her position was none of her making, any more than “the little wife,” as Maria Teresa called her, was herself responsible for the pitiful lack of preparedness with which she was despatched to France. Her education was woefully neglected until the death of one sister, and the moving up in the pecking order of another, meant that the last Archduchess was suddenly to be awarded the greatest position. Nevertheless the political implications of that position haunted Marie Antoinette from the first and followed her to the last.
As Dauphine and young Queen, this untrained girl was designated by her family to advance the interests of Austria in a role described by Joseph at one point as the “finest and greatest . . . that any woman ever played.”30 There were many Austrian complaints over the years that she did not fulfil it. At the same time, Marie Antoinette was suspected by the French of exerting exactly the kind of petticoat influence that the Austrians criticized her for neglecting. There was scant sympathy in Austria for her position once she had lost her political value, more especially after the death of Joseph II, who for all his claims had at least loved her (one suspects that his affection was deeper than Maria Teresa’s). The unalloyed Habsburg-Bourbon rivalry meant that France’s internal troubles provided opportunities for predatory Austria.
The attitude of the Austrians towards Marie Antoinette in her last years was cold, where that of the French was brutal; both behaved according to the exigencies of their own situation, not hers. This extended right up to October 1793. Queens were not usually killed; imprisoned, yes; banished; but killed? Yet at the National Convention, Hébert called for the head of Antoinette to unite them all in blood. Like her marriage, Marie Antoinette’s death was a political decision.
The final irony in all this was that Marie Antoinette was not by nature a political animal, a point on which Count Mercy frequently expatiated in despair. Left to herself, she would have carried out the role of queen consort in a graceful apolitical fashion, concentrating on the care of her children—she was indeed the “tender mother” of Madame de Staël’s plea—while adorning court functions. The effective collapse of Louis XVI in 1787, and periodically thereafter, meant that she really did have to assume control if they were not all to founder. But it is clear that she did so with much trepidation even if she surprised herself with her energy and her industry.
Curiously enough, Marie Antoinette’s instinctive attitude to her role as Queen—as opposed to the political twist she attempted, in the main unsuccessfully, to give to it—pointed to the way that royal ladies would see their role in the future: leading those apolitical, “retired” but charitable lives by which women could do the most good, in the words of Queen Charlotte. Individual acts of benevolence, private philanthropy, shedding an aura of kindness about her, above all pleasing—from childhood on, her love of pleasing people was one of her marked characteristics—all this was very much to Marie Antoinette’s taste. As Besenval said, she was easily touched by the unfortunate.31 Her famous care at the age of eighteen for the peasant injured in the royal stag-hunt, that much-disseminated image, was not an isolated incident but stood for a genuine, admirable compassion. The Marie Antoinette of the Tuileries in the spring of 1790, presiding over a charity committee, instructing her little boy on the need to care for unfortunate children, was a figure who would have fitted easily into the coming apolitical monarchies.
As for the simplicity she preferred, that, too, simply marked the transition from the grand baroque courts of the past to the more restrained versions of the nineteenth century with a strong domestic dimension. It was of course much criticized at the time—particularly by those left out or who suffered from the economies. Even Louis XVI felt that he had been at fault in approving such simple new ways just because they accorded so much with his own tastes. Nevertheless Mary Wollstonecraft, in An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution of 1794, surely carried such criticism rather far in blaming Marie Antoinette for throwing aside “the cumbersome brocade of ceremony” that would have masked the French court’s effeminate idle “caprices” and general emptiness.32 The truth was that the age of “cumbersome brocade” was inevitably passing, as Marie Antoinette, like many people in touch with the Zeitgeist, knew by intuition, not by reason. Ironically enough, the Queen, so often seen as the epitome of the ancien régime in all its foolish, stilted splendour, actually disliked such ways. It was the life of Versailles that was going out of date, not that of the Petit Trianon.
This is not to say that Marie Antoinette—crushed as she might be between the nether and the upper millstone of Austria and France, and blamed for changes that were actually brought about by the passage of time—was without faults. She was unquestionably pleasure-loving. The loyal Goncourt brothers in their biography of 1858 exclaimed indignantly: “In this century of women, nothing feminine is pardoned to the Queen.”33 Certainly it was incumbent upon the First Lady of Versailles to lead in fashion or at any rate in feminine display.
In the pursuit of pleasure she was also extravagant. To point out that the French royal family as a whole, including Mesdames Tantes as well as the King’s brothers and their wives, were prodigal in their spending is to explain the atmosphere in which she lived, but not to acquit her of the charge. Yet one might add to that defence not only the beauty that she created round about her but also a genuine appreciation of the arts, especially music in all its forms, which made her a generous patron. Finally, by what standards does one judge a royalty of great taste who spends too much money? (Charles I is the outstanding example.) Artistic or political? It is notoriously impossible to say.
One satiric pamphlet of 1792, Les Adieux de la Reine à ses Mignons et Mignonnes, was on stronger ground condemning the Trianon for its cost than when it listed the Queen’s lovers of both sexes: Rohan, the “vigorous Cardinal, Hercules of my burning and ferocious passion,” and Jeanne Lamotte.34 Such ostentatious spending was imprudent, and the acquisition of Saint Cloud for her own personal possession even more so. The atmosphere in which the details of the Diamond Necklace Affair would be believable—at least to her enemies—was created.
It is also true that Marie Antoinette as a young woman was not particularly prudent, if not in fact as imprudent as these same enemies believed. “My poor sister,” wrote Maria Carolina. “Her only fault was that she loved entertainments and parties and this led to her misery.”35 This was not the whole truth, although there was much truth in it. Many of her sins were venial, but nevertheless gave ammunition to those who had decided to criticize in the first place. If one takes, for example, the incident that led to the first personal attack, Le Lever d’Aurore, it was not a crime for a nineteen-year-old Queen, inspired by Rousseau-esque notions, to wish to see the dawn rising at Versailles. She was accompanied, after all, by Madame Étiquette herself, the Comtesse de Noailles, as well as by ladies and sisters-in-law. But there was a lightness of spirit there, that famous légèreté of which the French accused her and she accused the French. It vanished more or less with motherhood, certainly with the birth of her first son, Louis Joseph, by which she fulfilled at last “the wishes of France.”
The question therefore arises as to how much this frivolity—which faded but left its impression behind—was the product of an extremely unhappy and, indeed, humiliating married situation for the first seven and a quarter years of her time in France. Once again politics played its part in this, since the suspicion inculcated in the Dauphin about his Austrian bride can hardly have helped the shy and uncouth young man to make love to her. Nevertheless this failure was of enormous importance to them both psychologically—whether it was due to Marie Antoinette’s lack of adequate “caresses,” as Maria Teresa hinted, or to the Dauphin’s physical disability or, more plausibly, to awkwardness on both their parts, as the Emperor Joseph believed. Marie Antoinette, whose self-esteem was hardly bolstered by her mother’s incessant criticism, was branded a public failure. Louis XVI, a weak, indecisive but never malevolent character, also developed a sense of guilt towards his wife. He could never become the kind of strong dominant husband worthy of respect close to reverence, which Marie Antoinette had been taught in Vienna to expect. All he could do was dumbly resist her political influence with the aid of his ministers, as he did until 1787. And at the end of the monarchy—September 1792—he expressed his sense of despair to her in tears: “Madame, that you came from Austria for this!”
For Marie Antoinette arrived in France at the age of fourteen a highly dependent character, marked by a happy childhood association with her sister Maria Carolina. She looked round for repositories for her tender feelings, finding them first in the Princesse de Lamballe, more importantly in Yolande de Polignac and her family and circle. Although Marie Antoinette replied to the question of the Polignacs being “gorged with gold” at her trial, by pointing out that they had become wealthy as a result of their charges or positions at court, that was to avoid the issue. It was she who had been instrumental in seeing that these charges and other emoluments were received. Whatever Yolande de Polignac’s devotion, her appointment as Governess to the Children of France must be included among the Queen’s mistakes. Pampered friends, whether King’s mistresses or Queen’s friends, never help the image of those who pamper them; Marie Antoinette, in the folly of her excessive patronage of the Polignacs, was no exception to this rule.
There was a further consequence to Louis XVI’s publicly known impotence, about which satirists happily made up their crude rhymes. It provided ammunition against the Queen for allegations of lovers—if not her husband, then someone must be gratifying her—although the Queen was thought by those who knew her to have a fundamentally chaste nature. Her predisposition for chivalrous older men, or flirtatious foreigners, or some combination of the two, when she first arrived in France gave way to a romantic passion for Fersen, the man of action so unlike her husband. Otherwise there are no plausible linkings with the name of Marie Antoinette, who was in the meantime pilloried as the pattern of wicked, lubricious women in history. As Marie Antoinette wrote with truth to Yolande de Polignac, she did not fear poison: “That does not belong to this century, it’s calumny which they use, a much surer means of killing your unhappy friend.”36 She was not the only one traduced in the eighteenth century, that age of libellistes and pornographic bestsellers; there were calumnies before and after her. But she was the one destroyed by the poison. A frequent charge made against “Antoinette” was that she bathed in the blood of the French people; the truth of it was, of course, exactly the other way round.
Once the marriage of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was consummated, it can hardly be described as a bad marriage, as royal marriages go. Maria Teresa, for example, would have been happy to have had a husband who pointedly refused the mistresses that the court thoughtfully provided for him—although she might have missed the sexual performance of her own husband, the womanizing Francis Stephen. Yet there was an awkward side effect to this abstinence, so unfashionable in a monarch, which in the case of Louis XVI was a reproach to the morals of his grandfather: “I do not wish to see the scenes of the previous reign renewed,” he once said.37 It meant not only that the post of royal mistress was vacant, with many concomitant job opportunities thus missed, but also that the perceived political influence of the Queen was undiluted. For the King’s distaste at the idea of a mistress, Marie Antoinette can hardly be blamed; yet somehow she was turned into the scapegoat of this upsetting of the natural order of things—as the French court saw it.
A scapegoat was in fact what Marie Antoinette became. Among other things, she would be blamed for the whole French Revolution, by those who optimistically looked to one “guilty” individual as a way of explaining the complex horrors of the past. This view is epitomized by Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in his autobiography that if the Queen had been shut up in a convent, the whole Revolution would never have happened, an astonishingly draconian way of brushing aside the desperate need for reform in French society and government. The use of an animal or bird, who has the ills of the community heaped upon it before being driven out, has a long history in civilizations around the world. The name derived from the goat of the early Jews, described in Leviticus, presented alive before the Lord “to make an atonement with Him” and then “let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.” But there were many similar procedures in other societies, some of them involving women or children, or disabled people, nearly all of them ending in some unpleasant ritual death for the “scapegoats,” who were stoned or hurled from a cliff, as a result of which the community was supposed to be purged of sins, or otherwise plague and pestilence.38
Marie Antoinette was not driven out into the wilderness, stoned or hurled from a cliff; yet in a subtler way she was treated as a scapegoat, while her eventual fate, if less barbaric, was not much less cruel. Given that it is evidently a deep primitive urge to blame one individual when things go wrong, what better scapegoat to discover in a monarchy in crisis than a foreign princess? There she is, a subversive alien, in the bed of the head of state, her blood corrupting the dynasty . . . One only has to think of Henrietta Maria, French Catholic wife of Charles I in the years leading up to the English Civil War, or going forward to the nineteenth century the daughter of Queen Victoria, married to the Crown Prince of Germany, who was pilloried as “the Englishwoman.” In France, hatred that focused on Marie Antoinette, the Austrian woman, left many of the population free to continue to reverence the King himself. Gouverneur Morris, a visitor from the republican United States, observed how many Parisians felt a kind of grief when the King was executed, “such as for the untimely death of a beloved parent.”39
Compared to this lurid picture of an evil, manipulative, foreign wife, the real substance of Marie Antoinette became as a mere shadow. Having looked without passion at the extraordinary journey that was her life, one is drawn to the conclusion that her weaknesses, although manifest, were of trivial worth in the balance of her misfortune. Ill-luck dogged her from her first moment in France, the unwanted and inadequate ambassadress from a great power, the rejected girl-wife, until the end, when she was the scapegoat for the monarchy’s failure. Let the Queen herself have the last word.40 “Oh my God,” she wrote in October 1790, “if we have committed faults, we have certainly expiated them.”