Marie Antoinette

by Antonia Fraser

  Only the First Communion of Marie Thérèse, planned for 8 April at Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, showed signs that the old routines were in some way diminished. The King did not attend, although the Queen did so, incognito. It was traditional for a Daughter of France to receive a handsome set of diamonds from the monarch on such a sanctified occasion but Louis XVI judged that such a present would be intolerably extravagant in view of the general financial need. He told Marie Thérèse that she was too sensible to worry about such artificial pleasure, and would undoubtedly prefer to go without her jewels rather than that the public should go without bread. In a tender blessing, as his daughter knelt before him, the King told Madame Royale that her destiny remained unknown, whether she would stay in France or live in another kingdom . . . And he prayed openly for the necessary grace to satisfy those other “children” of his, the subjects over whom God had given him dominion.20

  On 12 May the Mayor of Paris presented the King with a commemorative gold medal with the inscription, “Henceforth I shall make this my official residence.” Bailly in his speech said that those words were engraved in the hearts of all citizens. The Queen and the Dauphin received similar medals, in silver and bronze. Marie Antoinette was assured by Bailly that the people wanted her to be always at the side of the King, while the Dauphin (“Monseigneur”) was to be instructed by the Queen’s example as well as the King’s.21 It was all very flowery. Ten days later the King and Queen walked on foot, as was customary, in the procession of the Blessed Sacrament, which marked the feast of Corpus Christi, and proceeded to Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois. The National Assembly, invited to participate, did so happily, with its president walking on the right of the King.

  This seemingly unchanged royal round masked the fact that vast political changes were not only taking place but were being accepted by the King. Catherine the Great, in a letter handwritten from despotic Russia and which Marie Antoinette showed to Madame Campan, advocated showing magnificent indifference to recent events: “Kings ought to go their own way without worrying about the cries of the people, as the moon goes on its course without being stopped by the cries of dogs.” This was not an option available to the King of France as a new Constitution was slowly—very slowly—hammered out by the National Assembly. There was a growing and deleterious gap, from the point of view of the King, between the apparent executive and the actual legislative arm of the government, since the National Assembly decreed that the King’s ministers could not be chosen from among its deputies. Political compromise seemed of the essence to preserve the King’s remaining authority. On 4 February, on the advice of Necker, the King went so far as to describe himself as “at the head of the Revolution” in a speech to the Assembly, having spent a rather pleasanter portion of the day stag-hunting.22 This placatory scene infuriated royalists abroad, who from exile found it easy to denounce the diminution of the King’s power.

  Louis XVI’s perceived weakness also had its critics within the bosom of his Parisian family. Madame Elisabeth, for so long the devoted pious gentle sister, was developing into a figure of proud conservatism, under the remote control of her brother Artois. She interpreted the events at Versailles from a paternalistic angle as being examples of the people’s dreadful ingratitude, adding, “If I were the King, I’d do something about making them regret it.” Revealingly, she told a correspondent that the memories of that night—an outrage of the divinely prescribed order—had almost turned her against praying. By May 1790, Madame Elisabeth admitted to Artois, in sentiments that divided her sharply from the brother and sister-in-law with whom she resided, that she regarded civil war as “necessary” with bloodletting being somehow therapeutic.23

  Like Louis XVI and unlike Elisabeth, Marie Antoinette believed in compromise. On 4 February 1790, when the King spoke to the National Assembly, she received some deputies on the terrace of the Tuileries where she was playing with Louis Charles. She made a gracious speech beginning, “Messieurs . . . behold my son,” and was told by one deputy to watch over “this precious kid.” The Queen had, in fact, had a speech prepared for her by the Keeper of the Seals, but in the event she spoke without a text. Her words summed up her public philosophy. In referring to France as “the nation I had the glory to adopt when I united myself with the King,” she went on to say that “my title of mother assures my links [with it] for ever.”24

  Yet even as these aspirations were entertained towards a state where the King still had some limited powers—a kind of constitutional monarchy, a parallel world was being developed. In this world the notion of escape was ever present. Immediately after the events of 6 October 1789, Marie Antoinette summoned the Secretary of the Queen’s Commandment, Augeard, to the Tuileries and gave him one of the little keys that enabled her confidential servants to slip in and out without observation. Augeard suggested that a loyal person should proceed to Vienna and ask for help. When the Queen asked him, “And who should that be?” the Secretary replied, “Your Majesty.” “What!” exclaimed the Queen. “I would leave the King alone.” But Augeard was full of practical plans: the Dauphin could be dressed as a girl, in clothes matching those of Madame Royale, while the Queen herself would be totally unadorned. And she would leave a letter for her husband (which could be made public) along these lines: “It is impossible for me to disguise the fact that I have had the terrible misfortune to displease your subjects.” She would rather condemn herself to “a secluded retreat outside your dominions” than be seen to interfere with the making of the new Constitution.25

  According to Augeard, the Queen listened to him seriously before rejecting the plan. On 19 October 1789, she told him: “All reflection is over; I shall not depart; my duty is to die at the feet of the King.” Nevertheless it is evident that not only Marie Antoinette but well-wishers around her were looking anew at her situation. On 12 November, for example, Mercy inspected the marriage contract hammered out nearly twenty years earlier. He noted that in the case of her widowhood, the Queen was free to stay in France or go to Austria.26 In late 1789, it is clear that her freedom of action rather than her widowhood was the issue.

  What is also clear is that one element already present in discussions of escape at Versailles on 15 July 1789—the reluctance of the Queen to leave the King’s side—remained firmly in place. As plans to legalize divorce in France were debated in 1790, being finally enacted in November, this reluctance gained rather than lost its strength, as Augeard would testify to Marie Antoinette’s sister Maria Carolina. Another element present from the beginning was the pathological indecision of the King.27 This, however sympathetic in a good man who feared to make things worse for his subjects, yet could not see how to make them better, combined fatally with the ultimate respect for his royal authority of those around him. At this stage Marie Antoinette hesitated to make up the King’s mind for him as she had once tried to do, so conscious was she of herself as a liability to the monarchy.

  All of this was seen to disastrous effect in various abortive schemes during the spring of 1790. The details of the Favras Affair, including the participation of the Comte de Provence, remain mysterious since the conspiracy never came to fruition. The Marquis de Favras, accused of a plot to kidnap the King and take him to Péronne, was tried and executed on 19 February 1790, leaving Louis XVI and Provence to grant his widow a pension. The Queen, who wanted to comfort the widow and her child but did not dare do so publicly, also sent fifty louis. When a similar scheme was mooted by the Comte d’Inisdal, it was resolved to seek the King’s agreement. The King first of all took refuge in silence, and then when his wife insisted that he must say something, muttered: “Tell the Comte d’Inisdal that I cannot consent to being abducted.” Was that tacit approval—so long as Louis himself could not be blamed? If not, what was it? The fact was that the attitude of the King was crucial and he was, as he had always been, “irresolute.”28

  It would not have been at all difficult to “rescue” Louis XVI in the early summer of 1790 or, indeed, for the King hi
mself to take flight. His Journal shows that in May he was riding out almost every other day to Bellevue and other places in order to keep up the frantic exercise that he found so necessary to his health, and there were no objections. The uniting of the Queen and the children with the head of the family later might have caused more problems, if not at this stage insuperable ones. However, in June the entire royal family was permitted to go to Saint Cloud as they would normally have done at this season to avoid the summer heat. Not only, as the Queen observed, did they all need fresh air desperately but they could also be more isolated from the menacing atmosphere of Paris where insults were hurled at her person daily. At Saint Cloud the King, riding by permission without guards for as much as five hours daily, was in an even stronger position to take evasive action. According to Madame Campan, the Queen had a plan to meet the King with the children in a wood a short distance from Saint Cloud . . . Her plan foundered because it would have meant abandoning the elderly royal aunts.29

  At this point the destination of the royal family in any proposed secret flight—or dignified departure—became an issue. Were they actually to cross the borders of France? Going abroad, to become the visible puppet of the émigrés led by Artois and the Princes de Condé and Conti, would be a perilous move for the King in terms of propaganda. As for the situation in Austria, the death of the Emperor Joseph II on 20 February 1790—he had been worn out by hard work and ravaged by tuberculosis—caused Marie Antoinette great grief. It also complicated her relationship with her homeland. In Joseph she mourned the loss of a “friend and brother” and she might have added a “quasi-father” too. But she had had in effect no real contact with his successor, Leopold, Duke of Tuscany, he of the prolific family, for twenty-five years.

  Of course, the new Emperor hastened to assure his sister that he would be giving her his full support, asking in return for the same friendship and confidence she had given Joseph. Marie Antoinette for her part told Leopold touchingly, if rather optimistically, that he could count on “a good ally” in Louis XVI. More candidly, Count Mercy admitted that Marie Antoinette and Leopold had never really got on. Yet this was the powerful brother on whom Marie Antoinette now depended to control the émigrés on the one hand and to prop up their own position—possibly with money—on the other. As the Bourbons abroad revealed their selfishness, Artois with his father-in-law the King of Sardinia in Turin, the lesser Princes in Coblenz, Marie Antoinette began to think wistfully of her original family. The thought of the marriage festivities of Leopold’s heir Francis to his first cousin, Maria Carolina’s daughter, who was said to resemble Marie Antoinette herself, made her misty-eyed. “You are in the middle of wedding feasts: I wish all the happiness possible to your children.”30

  Even the Archduchess Marie Christine, who had had her own troubles, was the subject of a new benevolence. Ejected with the Archduke Albert from Belgium by rebels known as the Patriots, Marie Christine had taken refuge at Bonn. Here the youngest Habsburg, Max, now Elector of Cologne, had given them a castle. Marie Antoinette was becoming increasingly wary of her correspondence falling into the wrong hands—people could so easily take the opportunity to forge her handwriting, with damaging interpolations—so that to Marie Christine she emphasized that their letters were simply “two sisters giving proof of friendship” and who could object to that? Her tone in May was infinitely sad. All the Queen wanted was for order and calm to return to “this unhappy country” and—a key phrase—to “prepare for my poor child [the Dauphin] to have a happier future than our own”; for they had seen “too many horrors and too much blood ever really to be happy again.” “When you are all three together,” Marie Antoinette concluded, referring to Marie Christine, Albert and Max, “think of me sometimes.”31

  In view of “the extravagance of Turin,” as Marie Antoinette described Artois’ increasingly martial behaviour, it made sense for the King and his own family to remain within the boundaries of France. The taint that an invasion, theoretically intended to help them, would bring to their cause had to be avoided. In July 1790, probably at the insistence of Count Mercy, Marie Antoinette returned to the political role that she had eschewed in the aftershock of 6 October 1789. But it was to be a strictly behind-the-scenes affair; she did not, for example, attend committees as she had done during the brief period of her real political influence. She did, however, allow herself to be drawn into delicate secret negotiations with the radical aristocrat, the Comte de Mirabeau, in the relative privacy of Saint Cloud. Mirabeau, whose dissolute lifestyle had left him with a mountain of debts, needed money; the King needed an ally who still believed that there was a place for the monarchy in the new Constitution.

  The Queen had feelings of revulsion for Mirabeau, referring to “the horror that his immorality inspires in me.” But she agreed to suppress these feelings in the interest of making Mirabeau’s constitutional plans work. (He on the contrary admired her “manly” strength of purpose.) The person she referred to as “M” was to be paid 5000 livres a month, all in the strictest secrecy. It was part of Mirabeau’s strategy that the King should leave Paris, and quite openly as well. Aiming at some system by which ministers were responsible to the National Assembly, he needed the King to be free to operate, without apparently being under duress. Mirabeau suggested that Louis XVI should adjourn either to Rouen, which lay in a loyalist area of the country, or to the château of Compiègne.32

  Another strong advocate of flight from an early stage was Count Fersen, now the Queen’s closest confidant. Whether or not an active sexual relationship still flourished, on which some doubt has already been cast, he continued to be Marie Antoinette’s passionate admirer, as he repeatedly confided to his sister Sophie Piper. To Fersen she was a heroine, misused, misjudged, sensitive and suffering—above all, so full of goodness, at a time when this kind of opinion of Marie Antoinette was rare enough. Although it was incidentally a loyalty shared by his mistress, Eléanore Sullivan, who with her official protector Quentin Craufurd, “ce bon Craufurd” as Marie Antoinette called him, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Queen. As early as January 1790, Fersen wrote that only a war—be it “exterior” or “interior”—could re-establish the royal authority in France; but how could that be achieved “when the King is a prisoner in Paris?”33 Fersen borrowed a house at Auteuil from the Queen’s friend and a member of her Private Society, Count Esterhazy. He was thus able to take full advantage of the presence of the royal family at Saint Cloud, which continued, with certain intermissions, until the end of October.

  Fersen’s influence as an active and practical promoter of an escape plan was further increased with the departure of Count Mercy, at the request of the Emperor Leopold. Marie Antoinette described herself as being “in despair” at this development and it is easy to see why. Although she staunchly tried to see that it was better for him personally to depart, Marie Antoinette had, after all, depended on Mercy’s advice, for better or for worse, for twenty years. Now he was leaving her at the most critical moment in her fortunes and she was terrified of “being mistaken in the course I must take.”34

  The Queen told the Emperor that Mercy had for her “the feelings of a father for a child,” but the reverse was actually the truth; it was Marie Antoinette who nourished childish sentiments of respect for and dependency on the ambassador, which were not necessarily reciprocated.35 Unlike Marie Antoinette, Mercy was not sentimental. The fact that he had known the Queen since she was a nervous fourteen-year-old fiancée weighed less with him than the duties imposed by his career, as he saw them. How could the emotional Marie Antoinette foresee that these duties would divide them, once the former ambassador to France became Minister in Brussels? His new task would be the pacification of Belgium following the Patriots’ revolt, which was brought to an end by Austrian troops in December 1790. The “Austrian woman” was left with only Counsellor Blumendorf and a skeleton staff representing her homeland in Paris.

  One of the forays made by the royal family from Saint Cloud to th
e Tuileries concerned the official celebration of the anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille. Marie Antoinette dreaded the occasion in advance, saying that she could not think back to that terrible time without trembling: “It brings together for us everything that is most cruel and sorrowful.” Nevertheless all the royals were dutifully present. In fact the Fête de la Fédération, as it was described in honour of patriotic “federal” movements nation-wide, had none of the violence associated with the previous years; it simply illustrated the bizarre contradictions as yet unresolved in the future of the government of France. There was, for example, the position of the Church. Two days earlier a Civil Constitution of the Clergy had been proposed, involving the popular elections of bishops and clergy; the pious King sanctioned it, with a heavy heart, perhaps, but he sanctioned it. On 14 July 1790 a commemorative Mass was said at the Champ-de-Mars by the Abbé Talleyrand, once assistant to Calonne in his financial reforms, then a deputy of the First Estate, now allied to Mirabeau. The Duc d’Orléans, returned from England, was present, as was the Duc de Chartres. Nearly seventeen and sharing his father’s political tendencies, Louis Philippe had taken to attending the Jacobin Club*76—one of the many lively debating clubs or “pressure groups” springing up in Paris. The young radical was recognized and carried shoulder high by the crowd.36