Marie Antoinette

by Antonia Fraser

  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 th
e 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 Quee
n 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.”

  NOTES

  Full bibliographical details of the works cited in short form will be found in the list of Sources.