Marie-Antoinette, Daughter of the Caesars

by Elena Maria Vidal

  ‘I weep less for myself than for you.’

  Louis XVI replied: ‘Our eyes were not given us to weep with, but to look up to Heaven, the source of all our consolations….’

  At these words, the Queen dried her eyes and faced the situation with the magnificent courage that sustained her to the end. It was now that she entered the fifth phase of her life. Once, a light-hearted child—then a pleasure-loving woman—a mother—a politician—she fulfilled her tragic destiny to the last and became that great figure revered by all noble minds of posterity—the Queen Martyr.5

  .

  Louis’ childhood struggles with tuberculosis came back to haunt him as the political crisis escalated for both his baby daughter Sophie and his oldest son were infected with consumption. I think seeing Louis-Joseph die just as he had watched his older brother die long ago revived a lot of the childhood trauma. Death from tuberculosis is not pretty to watch. I am of the opinion that since the death of his oldest son, which coincided with the beginning of the Revolution in 1789, Louis XVI was suffering from clinical depression. In the past, he had acted with much more energy and decision. It is one of the reasons Antoinette had to become more involved in the political arena during the Revolution. He was deprived of much of his riding after October 1789 and it had a devastating effect upon his health and state of mind. Losing two of his children, his authority, his home, seeing his people and family suffer, and being deprived of the exercise and fresh air vital to his health, left him in a very bad condition. If we consider the courage with which Louis XVI faced the worst moments

  of crisis, including his death, then he is to be admired, especially in the light of everything else. The Queen is to be admired as well, for she could have slipped out of the country with her surviving children and left Louis to his doom—there were many plans for her escape—but she refused to budge from Louis’ side. She would not leave him to face the disasters alone.

  Throughout the reign of Louis XVI there were crop failures in different parts of the country due to adverse weather conditions. The year 1788 was especially bad in every way. In July, an incredible hailstorm swept through the countryside; the hailstones destroyed crops across many provinces. This caused there to be a poor harvest, followed by a winter with freezing temperatures. In Provence and Languedoc not only was the olive crop destroyed but one third of the trees as well. The chestnut trees and a variety of crops in southern France also suffered from the cold and the frost. People began to die of starvation as well as illnesses brought on by the extreme physical hardships. As has been seen, Louis and Antoinette dedicated themselves to relieving the sufferings of their people, by charitable works and also by economizing in the royal household. Many extraneous court posts were deleted; the Queen began refurbishing her clothes and shoes, and she and Louis sold their flatware so as to have money for famine relief. They took to eating cheap barley bread at Versailles. The King bought grain for the people from the Netherlands. However, the efforts of the King and his minister was counteracted by persons such as the Duc d’Orléans, whose grain speculation made the bread shortages more catastrophic than they already were.6

  In the meantime, Louis had been through a succession of ministers who sought to salvage the government and economy from total bankruptcy but to no avail. At the advice of his liberal minister Turgot, Louis implemented deregulation of the grain market but it led to inflated bread prices. Turgot and Malesherbes put radical financial reforms in place, which angered the nobles and were blocked by the parlements who insisted that the King did not have the legal right to levy new taxes. In 1776, Turgot was dismissed and Malesherbes resigned, to be replaced by the Swiss banker Jacques Necker. Instead of raising taxes, Necker took out large international loans. In 1781, in an attempt to pander to popular opinion, he published the Crown’s first financial statement, called Compte rendu au roi. As the situation failed to improve, Louis dismissed Necker and appointed Calonne in his place in 1783. Calonne increased public spending in an effort to stimulate the economy. The project was a disaster; Louis convoked the Assembly of Notables in 1787 to discuss a revolutionary new fiscal reform proposed by Calonne. However, the nobles rejected the plan since they felt it chipped away at their ancient prerogatives, one of which was to be exempt from taxation. At this point, Antoinette became involved and she persuaded Louis to appoint as finance minister the Archbishop of Toulouse, Lomenie de Brienne, who was head of the Assembly of Notables. Louis did not like Brienne because he was an atheist in spite of being a bishop; he also had a loathsome skin disease and Louis refused to touch any papers that he had handled. But Brienne became finance minister and succeeded in making the parlement register edicts dealing with internal free trade. When the parlement refused to register edicts on the stamp duty and the proposed new general land-tax, Louis XVI held a lit de justice, to enforce the registration of his edicts. When his cousin the Duc d’Orléans, leader of the opposition, insisted it was illegal, Louis replied: “It is legal because I wish it.”7 In August 1787, Louis exiled the parlement to Troyes. He also exiled his cousin Orléans to the country. A further attempt by Brienne to force the parlement to register an edict for raising a loan of 120 million livres met with determined opposition. The struggle between parlement and Brienne ended in its voting for its own abolition, under the condition that the Estates-General be summoned as a remedy for the disordered financial affairs of the state. Brienne resigned on August 25, 1788. Louis began to prepare for the Estates-General, while struggling with discouragement as well as health issues. Of course, the Queen was blamed for all of France’s problems, although her expenditures over eighteen years were miniscule compared to the massive expense of the American War which had pushed France over the edge into an economic freefall.8

  From the beginning of her marriage there was a preoccupation in the court in particular and in France in general with Antoinette’s body: with her beauty, her clothing, her sex life, her ability to bear children. The initial adulation and infatutation had turned to violent disappointment. From her first days as Queen, her enemies began to circulate pornographic depictions of her. Of course, if people had not been so eager to look at it, it would have had no effect whatsoever. People did look at it and, as is the way with pornography, it altered the way many of them perceived reality. It is often wondered at how such a civilzed nation as France could have degraded itself with the extreme violence which came to characterize the Revolution. Contrary to the popular notion of the Revolution being led by starving peasants, the real instigators were well-fed artistocrats and bourgeois. They were able to play upon the fears of the lower classes who were genuinely suffering as a result of famine and unemployment. However, the French Revolution has been more and more revealed as an era of great misogyny, as expressed in the pornographic pamphlets which were circulated in vast quantities. The sheer volume of pornographic material attests to the fact that there was a demand for such filth. Perhaps the century and a half of Jansenism in France can be blamed for the mass addiction to porn, Jansenism being a rigorist, puritanical heresy which had infiltrated French Catholic piety. When everything is forbidden, then nothing is forbidden. Considering that there have been found to be psychological links between porn and violence, particularly sexual violence, then it is not surprising how vicious the sadism came to be, which should surprise no one, since the convicted sex offender the Marquis de Sade was one of the pornographers.

  The lewd drawings targeted Antoinette and her circle with particular fury. In her book The Wicked Queen, historian Chantal Thomas emphasizes the fact that the pamphlets had no connection with the real Antoinette at all, except to use her name and her face. “Any reading that credits the caricature of the pamphlets with a modicum of reality falls into…confusion.”9 She was most often depicted as a lesbian, in the drawings as in the lewd plays and false “memoirs” which often accompanied them. Homosexuality was the eighteenth century replacement for witchcraft and was the worst thing one could be accused of, although the word “homose
xual” did not yet exist. Other words, such as “sodomite” or “tribade” were used. The Queen herself ignored the pamphlets as much as possible, believing that such trash was beneath her notice and that the truth would prevail. Louis XVI, more aware of the danger to the monarchy, attempted to have them bought up and destroyed. The pamphlets did irreparable harm to the Queen’s image and led many people to believe that not only was she a nymphomaniac but that she hated the French people with a vampire-like frenzy. Such lies led to a conflagration of savagery.

  Some of the pornographic pamphlets were printed at the order of Louis’ brother, the Comte de Provence, and his cousin, the Duc d’Orléans.10 Both men were involved in their own struggles for power. They ridiculed the marriage of Louis and Antoinette and the seven years it took for them to have a child, accusing Louis of impotence. However, after the Queen had children, and in particular, a son and heir, the vitriolic attacks on her chastity became more heated and widespread from those who wished to destroy the monarchy. The Queen as the mother of a future king was a formidable enemy who had to be destroyed. Enough people were obsessed with Antoinette that she had to be constantly shown in the nude and engaged in copulation. It was the closest thing to having the Queen stripped and violated. True, the images had nothing to do with her actual behavior, but everything to do with the twisted fantasy life of too many citizens; it goaded them to madness. It made the unthinkable believable, which is why Hébert was embolded at the Queen’s trial to accuse her of incest with her own son. Another of the most common ways to attack the Royal Family was to depict them as animals or mythological beasts. Animal caricatures were not only a humiliation, but a way to dehumanize the King and his family—or anyone else the Revolution needed to attack.

  Many authors have accused Freemasonry of having a subversive, potent role in the distribution of pornography as well as in the planning and organization of the Revolution. It is well known of course, that the King’s main enemy, Philippe d’Orléans, was head of the Grand Orient Lodge. In 1738, Pope Clement XII prohibited Catholics from becoming Freemasons, on the grounds that the order required secret oaths, involved pagan rituals, and encouraged religious indifferentism. But like papal decrees before and after, many Catholics blithely decided to ignore the prohibition and joined the masons, anyway. They thought that those who took such bans seriously were being stuffy and getting in the way of progress. Lawyers, doctors, merchants, artists, writers, ladies, aristocrats, kings and emperors, who were otherwise practicing Catholics, were initiated into various lodges, lodges which often rivaled each other with different goals and endeavors. In the family of Antoinette there were some members who were masons, including her father, Emperor Francis I. Her mother, Empress Maria Theresa, was vehemently against masonry. The Empress sent the police to raid one of the lodges while her husband the Emperor was at a meeting, and he had to escape by a back staircase.

  Freemasonry was so popular among European aristocracy in the 18th century that some ladies joined a bizarre offshoot called the Mopses which was supposed to bypass the papal ban. It involved kissing the backside of a pug dog but other than that gross peculiarity it seemed to be nothing but a ridiculous waste of time. While there is no evidence that Antoinette was herself ever initiated into a lodge, she went through a phase when she was favorable to Freemasonry.11 Her close friend, the virtuous Madame de Lamballe, presided over the Lodge of the Social Contract, one of the ladies’ lodges or loges d'adoption. In 1781, Madame de Lamballe eventually became Grand Mistress of all of the Lodges of Adoption in France. That same year, Antoinette wrote to one of her friends, praising the good works of the masonic sisterhood, and how they provided dowries for poor girls and were very pious. She also praised them in a letter to her sister Maria Christina, saying: “It is only a society of benevolence and pleasure.”12 She and Louis XVI both saw the masons as a means of charitable works to benefit society, and they both may have at one point visited certain lodges, so that to this day, some masonic groups claim them as their own. There is also evidence that Antoinette’s best friend Madame de Polignac was a member of a ladies’ lodge, along with Louis XVI’s Orléans cousin the Duchesse de Bourbon.13 Nesta Webster, who blames the masons for practically everything, said that the Lodges of Adoption were harmless enough ladies’ clubs. They were probably one step away from the Mopses, but Catholics should not have joined, since masonry was forbidden by the Church.

  As for Louis XVI, there has long been a debate as to if he was ever formally initiated into a lodge as his brothers probably were. When he ascended the throne, Louis XVI was quite liberal and progressive; like all young progressives at the time he saw the masons not only as harmless, but as a group who would benefit society by active good works. Some of this explains his initial acquiescence to certain measures in the beginning of the Revolution which were damaging to the Church, especially the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. He admits as much in the Vow to the Sacred Heart which he made under house arrest in the Tuileries in 1791.14

  It is true that many monarchists were masons and many revolutionaries were not masons. However, in the years preceding the Revolution of 1789, masonic lodges formed a network that fomented discord, spread propaganda against the King and especially against the Queen. The lodges were used by a core of aristocrats and politicians who wanted to secularize society, and destroy the Church, or at least enervate it, by destroying or by seizing the crown. Antoinette came to see this quite clearly. On August 17, 1790 she wrote to her brother Emperor Leopold II of Austria: “Be well on your guard where you are with regard to all associations of Freemasons. You must already have been warned that it is by this means that all monsters here count on attaining the same end in every country. Oh, God, preserve my Fatherland and you from such misfortunes.”15 For Antoinette and Louis XVI, the warnings had not been heeded, until it was too late.

  The internet is crawling with various sites with phrases such as “Marie-Antoinette obstinately fought for the divine right of kings.” Yes, it seems to be the general consensus that Antoinette did not support the French Revolution; she even had the temerity to think that monarchy was a good idea. How could anyone expect the “Daughter of the Caesars” to see things differently? Her father was the Holy Roman Emperor, her mother an autocratic sovereign in her own right, and yet people censure Antoinette for not rejoicing when France became a Republic. It should be kept in mind that the Revolution was introduced to her in a manner of extreme violence, with herself and her family being dragged to Paris with the heads of guards on pikes before them. That the Queen would dedicate herself to trying to save her family from further violence by working against the Revolution should not come as a great shock.

  There are several points that need to be considered here. First of all, Antoinette was indeed an Austrian Archduchess, raised to be the consort of the European ruler. She had it instilled in her mind from early on that she was meant to be a queen, although it was not until late in her childhood that it was decided that she was to be the bride of the Dauphin of France. Therefore, Antoinette was brought up with the idea that it was the monarchy which protected the rights of the people, particularly from the excesses of greedy nobles and barbarous invaders. Without the monarchy’s protection, the people would become pawns in games between politicians who would take power for themselves and become dictators. Or so she was taught to see it.

  Among European monarchs who were contemporaries of Louis XVI and Antoinette, the more “enlightened” ones, such as Antoinette’s brother Joseph II, and Catherine the Great of Russia, open to the teachings of the deists and philosophes, were also the most despotic. The enlightened despots loved to talk about the rights of man but in actuality ruled with iron hands, especially in contrast to the benevolence of Louis XVI. Antoinette herself was not closed to the new ideas; she read Rousseau and was favorable to the civic contributions of the masons; both she and Louis were great advocates of reform and progress. However, the escalating violence of the Revolution and the laws against the Churc
h, as promulgated by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790, killed any support the Queen might have had for the Revolution. Nevertheless, she corresponded with prominent revolutionaries such as Barnave, in order to have some influence on the course of events. She called the constitution passed on September 14, 1791 “a tissue of impracticable absurdities,” as she wrote to the Austrian ambassador; even the revolutionaries came to regard it so, and scrapped it.16 She wanted the foreign powers, particularly her brother the Emperor, to form a congress which would put pressure on the revolutionaries and restore order. However, she thought that any attempts of military invasion on the part of the Louis XVI’s brothers would lead to more violence against the crown and her fears were proved to be right.17 18

  The calling of the Three Estates was the last recourse open to the King in his effort to correct the situation of unequal taxation in France. If his reforms could have become law, it would have reversed many of the country’s economic problems. The parlements had resisted registering his edicts. By summoning the Third Estate, which was comprised of the elected representatives of the common people, he hoped to appeal directly to those citizens whom his programs would most benefit. By doing so, he was taking a tremendous risk, because many of the people’s elected representatives were disciples of Voltaire and Rousseau. Not only that, but the powerful nobles and clergymen, who would lose money from Louis’ tax reforms, sought to agitate the bourgeois representatives against their King. Meanwhile, Louis had decided that the Third Estate should have as many deputies as the clergy (First Estate) and the nobility (Second Estate) combined, extending the franchise to all male tax payers over twenty-five. He was giving concessions that no king had ever granted before, hoping to win the commoners to his side. He was determined to make the Estates-General a success, and devoted all of 1788 to preparing for it. If successful, he believed it would have meant a new era of prosperity and civil peace for France. In accordance with the character of his reign, he planned to protect religion and the good traditions, while pruning away what was cumbersome and obsolete. But he needed to have the nation behind him.