If we were to ask a sober-minded French citizen of the time what his complaint against the Queen was, he would no doubt have summarised it under three headings: her extravagance, her immoral life and her lack of patriotism. The first charge — whether founded or not — we have explored elsewhere. The second we touched on in the discussion of the vast number of lovers she was imagined to have. And of course, after the necklace trial, this particular accusation was greatly reinforced by the influence of the literary productions of Jeanne de la Motte and the pamphleteers.
By this stage there was nothing the Queen could do to stop those Parisians with filthy minds and the souls of concierges instantly ‘seeing through’ her schemes for debauchery. If the Queen was so fond of spending her summer evenings out on the terraces overlooking the park at Versailles, it was perfectly clear what she got up to in the dark … Thus it rapidly got abroad that she and her intimate circle — Coigny, Vaudreuil, Besenval and the rest — had ordered costumes representing wild animals, and “after dressing up as harts and hinds, had strayed through the park, giving themselves up to the pleasures of harts and hinds”. That could only speak for itself. According to others, Marie-Antoinette would wander through the Versailles gardens dressed as an Amazon, offering herself to anyone — man or woman — she came upon. One young man in particular, an official from the War Ministry, a real Adonis, had caught her eye, but Artois became jealous, the young man vanished without trace shortly afterwards, and his family never saw him again. And so on, and on, and on …
Popular opinion demeaned and besmirched her gaiety of spirit, her love of a beautiful and freer-flowing life, her desire for friendship, and the innocent flirtatiousness by which she sought to please everyone: in short, les plus belles vertus de sa jeunesse—the loveliest qualities of her youth — as the brothers Goncourt put it. But even if the Queen were not a Vestal Virgin, did that really deserve such moral outrage from the not-so-puritanical French? “It was a strange kind of censoriousness,” the brothers exclaim, and they are right to do so, “that even in the so-called century of women the Queen was to be forgiven nothing that expressed real femininity.” French historians of this most frivolous of periods seem to tolerate everyone else’s peccadilloes as something to be expected, and find them perfectly natural — so why not those of their queens?
The answer to this question becomes clear when we confront the third of these accusations. The French did not dislike Marie-Antoinette because she was immoral. On the contrary, they found her immoral, and piled the decaying products of their basest fantasies on her, because they did not like her … And the chief reason why they disliked her, it seems to us, can only have been that she wasn’t French.
The Queen, it cannot be denied, was bound by a thousand ties, emotional and political, to the house of her birth and the powerful family from which she had come. Sanguine by nature, it never occurred to her for a moment that the interests of the two allies, Austria and France, might not always exactly coincide. Public opinion, which had never felt much enthusiasm for the Austrians (the French had always passionately hated any alliance with them) exaggerated her links with that country, spoke of the millions of livres she sent back to her brother, and took great delight in passing on stories by word of mouth, such as the following:
When Joseph II of Austria ordered the closure of the Schelde corridor, Marie-Antoinette defended him with all her might before the French Court, and told the Foreign Minister Vergennes:
“All you ever think about the Emperor is that he is my brother.”
To which he replied:
“I do always bear it in mind. But before all else I have to consider that Monsieur the Dauphin is your son.”
France was a closed society, in which outsiders had no place. There has never been a European country in which foreigners were shown less sympathy. A foreign-born queen, tainted with foreign interests, could never be popular, and when the hostility towards her reached its peak, the very worst term of abuse they could find for her was L’Autrichienne: ‘that Austrian woman’.
This fact can perhaps only be fully understood, and felt on the skin, by people from outside the country. If someone in Hungary remarks that “You’re not Hungarian”, it is of course not exactly flattery, but nor is it necessarily an insult. It could be a simple statement of fact. If an Englishman happens not to be pure English, and has Scots or Welsh blood in his veins, he will be openly proud of it. But if someone in France tells you, “You are not French!” it denotes something lacking, some fundamental moral deficiency. You probably go around at night with a false beard stealing small change from the caps of blind beggars, are furthermore physically deformed, and carry Lord knows what weapons concealed beneath your garments; in short, you are a subhuman creature, though rather less likeable than an animal.
As can be imagined, this powerful French xenophobia may well have been the basis of Marie-Antoinette’s unpopularity.
However, as we have said, Marie-Antoinette was neither a demon, as the Revolution painted her, nor the angel portrayed by the counter-revolution. Perhaps Stefan Zweig is right: the real problem was that she was simply mediocre. Her final martyrdom is very touching, but there really is nothing in her life to make us think of her with particular veneration or emotion. As we take our leave of her, we should quote, in their original beauty, the words of Lamartine, in which he characterises her as follows:
Favorite charmante et dangereuse d’une monarchie vieillie, plutôt que d’une monarchie nouvelle, elle n’eut le prestige de l’ancienne royauté, le respect; ni le prestige du nouveau règne: la popularité. Elle ne sut que charmer, égarer, et mourir.
The charming and dangerous favourite of an ageing monarchy, rather than the queen of a new one, she lacked the prestige of old royalty, the respect due to it; and she also lacked the prestige accorded to a new reign — popularity. All she knew was how to charm, to lose her way, and to die.
Epilogue
COMING TO THE END OF OUR STORY and reading through what we have written, we are somewhat alarmed to find that however much we have tried to paint a full and many-sided picture of the age, we have still not really succeeded in placing sufficient emphasis on what Talleyrand called ‘the sweetness of life’. The reader might well be left with the impression that the final hours of the Ancien Régime were careworn and oppressive, a ‘moral wasteland’, a time of drought before the storm, and he would perhaps be glad not to have lived then. Which would be quite wrong. To have been alive then must have been to experience one of the most delightful of European centuries.
Huizinga notes in another connection that ‘chronicles’, that is, works of history written as literature, almost always paint a rather dark picture of our period, because they find its grievances so vivid. Anyone who wants to learn about the brightness, beauty and happiness of a particular age has to turn to the record left by artists. And if we follow the great Dutchman’s advice and compare the painters of various centuries from the ‘eudaemonic’ point of view, would we find any other age whose canvases reflect the sweetness of life with the same intensity as that marvellous line of artists from Watteau to Fragonard?