“The young lady was beautiful, aristocratic, as radiant as she was imposing. I have retained a vivid memory of her face ever since,” he continues, in the courtly manner of his later years. “Everyone had a good view of her in her glass coach, sharing little confidences with her female attendants, as if making a joke about the huge procession streaming ahead of her.” Perhaps even then she gave the impression that she found people amusing.
Goethe goes on to mention that this first ill omen was quickly followed by an even more horrific one. When the Dauphine arrived at Versailles a firework display was arranged in her honour in Paris. Fire broke out, the streets were blocked, and the crowd was prevented from escaping. People were crushed underfoot, leaving thirty-three dead and hundreds more injured.
However he fails to mention the third omen, the strangest of all. The day after she passed through the door of Strasbourg Cathedral, the Bishop appointed his coadjutor, who then celebrated the mass. This was Prince Louis de Rohan, who would later cause her more distress than anyone else in the world.
Even in those aristocratic centuries, the Rohans ranked among the most aristocratic families of France. They enjoyed the status of foreign princes, coming, together with the Ducs de Lorraine, immediately after the royal family. Their proud motto was: Roi ne puis, prince ne desire, Rohan suis—‘I can never be king, I have no desire to be a prince: I am a Rohan.’ One Rohan duchess, Chamfort relates, when asked when she was expecting a family event, replied: “I flatter myself I shall have the honour within a fortnight.” The honour, that is, of bringing a Rohan into the world.
Characteristically, not a single member of this family was ever a statesman or general, or sufficiently distinguished in any other field to justify such overweening pride. In this they were very much as one thinks of the grandees of the Ancien Régime: they “did nothing but be born — and given a choice they would not have taken the trouble to do that”, as Figaro remarks.
The odd thing is that the details of their origin survived at all, against a background of wandering populations and prolific mythmaking. They claimed descent from the rulers of Brittany — their ancestor Guéthénoc, youngest son of the Duc de Bretagne, became the Vicomte de Porhoët in 1021. The family had used the name Rohan ever since 1100. Even so, Brittany remained a small, half-savage domain in the back of beyond until Anna, the last little ‘clog-wearing Duchess’, married Charles VIII of France, taking the entire peninsula with her as dowry. This marks the entry of the Rohans into France.
The Protestant branch of the family, the Rohan-Gies, produced some stubborn and brave men of conscience during the wars of religion, but the line died out in 1540. In the eighteenth century two major branches remained, the Rohan-Guéménées and the Rohan-Soubises. The latter’s best-known son was the Maréchal de Soubise, a courtier who was made a general through the influence of Mme de Pompadour, despite his complete lack of talent. It was he who, together with an Austrian duke, achieved the remarkable feat of leading an army of 60,000 to defeat against 20,000 soldiers of Frederick the Great at Rossbach, the decisive battle of the Seven Years War.
The other branch, Rohan-Guéménée, is noted chiefly for the fact that despite annual revenues of astronomical proportions, its representatives went bankrupt in 1781, in debt to the tune of thirty-three million livres, taking countless lesser folk down with them, simple Breton sailors who had put their money with them in the expectation of life annuities. The Guéménées, finding what was left of their fortune insufficient to maintain their lifestyle, were forced to give up their courtly status and pretensions. Their bankruptcy contributed significantly to the general loss of respect for the aristocracy.
The Strasbourg bishopric was part of the family inheritance, so to speak. Half-a-century before the grand entry of Marie-Antoinette, another Rohan had received a foreign princess at the cathedral door. This was Maria Leszczynska, who became the unhappy wife of Louis XV.
Duc Louis de Rohan was born in 1734. In 1760 he was appointed coadjutor to his uncle the Bishop of Strasbourg, and simultaneously made Bishop of Canopus in Egypt in partibus infidelium—the honorary prelate of a diocese that had been in the hands of pagans for well over a thousand years. The top echelons of the Church had always included persons of the highest social rank, but by the seventeenth century the aristocratic families associated with the French Court had appropriated the sees of bishops and archbishops exclusively for themselves. Not only was Rohan’s uncle a bishop, his cousin Ferdinand de Rohan was Archbishop of Cambrai, and the ducal La Rochefoucauld family alone filled three episcopal sees: Rouen, Beauvais and Saintes. The Court aristocracy, like the princes of the Church, made few adjustments to their personal lives or outward manner of living — one of the reasons why the French Church was so weak in the eighteenth century. The gulf between its upper ranks and the poorly-endowed lower clergy was every bit as great as that between the aristocracy and the nation at large. At a critical moment in the early days of the Revolution representatives of the lower ranks of the clergy aligned themselves with the citizenry, an act that had decisive consequences.
Louis de Rohan was not just a dignitary of the church. Since 1761 he had also been a member of the Académie Française, counting among the ‘Immortals’. Of its thirty-eight members in 1789 (two places were vacant) there were seven nobles and five senior churchmen — an aristocratic age indeed. Earlier, under Louis XIV, France’s bishops and academicians had been almost entirely of bourgeois origin. The final years of the Ancien Régime were by far the most aristocrat-dominated.
What sort of man was this Duc Louis de Rohan? According to his contemporaries he was extremely refined and well-mannered, a witty companion, and a fine speaker — by no means a disgrace to the Academy. He was both chivalrous and genuinely good-hearted, and his followers noted countless touching acts of charity carried out behind the scenes: a true son of the times, a man of feeling, as indeed was his royal master, Louis XVI.
But these facts tell us almost nothing, and the surviving portraits of the man add little more. They show the refined but somewhat expressionless features of the frail, rather spoilt, offspring of elderly parents: the face of a man almost impossible to describe. The sort of man of whom you might say: had he not been born a prince he would be indistinguishable from anyone else. But that judgement would be superficial. Rohan was a true-born prince — his Rohan qualities were as integral to his being as any inherited predisposition to disease of the organs. They determined his character and his fate as surely as tuberculosis or neurasthenia.
If we wish to understand him, our point of departure must be not his personal traits but his social position.
Rohan was a grand seigneur, in the heyday of his type — a time when to be one implied not merely differentness but a way of life based on aristocratic rule, at a time when the whole of Europe, so to speak, existed to sustain the lofty status of his class.
Western culture was essentially aristocratic. From its birth at the end of the eleventh century down to the French Revolution its aim had been for a small number of the chosen to attain the dream of the beautiful life; a life as pure, ordered and wonderful as a work of art from the hand of a genius, and no less independent of the mundane world and the vicissitudes of fortune. Such a culture finds its most complete expression in the royal court, the idealised life-that-transcends-life. This ideal was served by chivalry, ceremony and protocol, and its underlying aims by art and poetry.