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In the course of tracing this journey, I have hoped to unravel the cruel myths and salacious distortions surrounding her name. Principal among them must be the notorious incident which has Marie Antoinette urging the poor, being without bread, to eat cake. This story was first told about the Spanish Princess who married Louis XIV a hundred years before the arrival of Marie Antoinette in France; it continued to be repeated about a series of other Princesses throughout the eighteenth century.
Biographers have their small private moments of perception, the importance of which was recognized by the Goncourt brothers, admiring biographers of the Queen in 1858: “a time of which one does not have a dress sample and a dinner menu, is a time dead to us, an irrecoverable time.”
Probably no queen in history has been so well served by her female chroniclers.
Since the experience of childbirth was no novelty, and since Maria Teresa, Queen of Hungary by inheritance, Empress of the Holy Roman Empire by marriage, hated to waste time, she also laboured in another way at her papers. For the responsibilities of government were not to be lightly cast aside;
French, acknowledged as the language of civilization, that was the universal language of courts throughout Europe;
The trouble was that this affable little creature had managed, it seemed, to avoid more or less the unpleasant experience of education, other than in the arts where her skill in dancing and her taste for music added to her general aura of grace.
It is notoriously impossible for those whose chief pleasure is reading to understand the mentality of those to whom it seems at best an arduous task.
The real betrayal in Marie Antoinette’s education was that she was never encouraged to concentrate.
“Farewell, my dearest child. A great distance will separate us . . . Do so much good to the French people that they can say that I have sent them an angel.” MARIA TERESA’S PARTING WORDS TO HER DAUGHTER, 1770
“Will my daughter be happy?” His reply was suitably gnomic: “There are crosses for all shoulders.”3
The fate of a princess who married into a foreign country was to be a hostage—possessed. But she was also expected to be an ambassador.
Isabella of Parma had outlined the unhappy possibilities: “What should the daughter of a great prince expect? . . . Born the slave of other people’s prejudices, she finds herself subjected to the weight of honours, these innumerable etiquettes attached to greatness . . . a sacrifice to the supposed public good.”
Napoleon, marrying Marie Antoinette’s great-niece forty years later, expressed the bargain rather more crudely: “I am marrying a womb.”18
Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese-born wife of Charles II, tried to cheer up her niece Princess Mary, who was on her way to Holland to marry her cousin William of Orange, with memories of her own apprehensions, which had happily been unnecessary. “But Madam, you came into England! I am going out of it,” replied the Princess with the cruelty of youth.
Marie Antoinette: “I shall never forget that you are responsible for my happiness!” Choiseul: “And that of France.”
“Don’t speak to me in German,” she said firmly. “From now on I want to hear no other language but French.” The fact that Marie Antoinette spoke these engaging words with a slight accent made them especially touching.
He had already cross-questioned his ambassador to Austria about her bosom, and on being told with a blush that the ambassador had not looked at the Archduchess’s bosom, the King replied jovially: “Oh didn’t you? That’s the first thing I look at.”
“It’s not your beauty, which frankly is not very great,” wrote the mother to the daughter. “Nor your talents nor your brilliance (you know perfectly well that you have neither).” It was solely her good nature and her pretty ways, so well deployed, that had enabled Marie Antoinette to please.
Letting everyone down in this respect would be “the greatest unhappiness” for her.
Now, if at all, during the period of the Flour War, was the occasion when Marie Antoinette might have uttered the notorious phrase: “Let them eat cake” (Qu’ils mangent de la brioche). Instead, she indulged to her mother in a piece of reflection on the duties of royalty. Its tenor was the exact opposite of that phrase, at once callous and ignorant, so often ascribed to her. “It is quite certain,” she wrote, “that in seeing the people who treat us so well despite their own misfortune, we are more obliged than ever to work hard for their happiness. The King seems to understand this truth; as for
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In fact that lethal phrase had been known for at least a century previously, when it was ascribed to the Spanish princess Marie Thérèse, bride of Louis XIV, in a slightly different form: if there was no bread, let the people eat the crust (croûte) of the pâté. It was known to Rousseau in 1737. It was credited to one of the royal aunts, Madame Sophie, in 1751, when reacting to the news that her brother the Dauphin Louis Ferdinand had been pestered with cries of “Bread, bread” on a visit to Paris. The Comtesse de Boigne, who as a child played at the Versailles of Marie Antoinette, attributed the
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But then it could be plausibly argued that one of the duties of the Queen of France—the centre of the world of fashion, which had a strong commercial motive to remain so—was to see that the modes flourished by leading them.
In a country where details of appearance, costume and presentation were “vital matters,” as the Savoyard ambassador had observed on the subject of the Comtesse de Provence, Marie Antoinette was an appropriate consort.
it should be pointed out that the entire royal family was prodigiously extravagant, seeing little connection between what they spent and what they had to spend.
Even if Mercy clucked over Marie Antoinette’s acquisition of further diamonds “in these circumstances,” the fact was that the personal extravagance of the Queen of France was of very little monetary consequence compared to this vast American venture, masterminded by Vergennes.
“Is it a revolt?” asked Louis XVI. “No, Sire,” came Liancourt’s reply (which there is no reason to suppose he did not make). “It is a revolution!”
In England, Queen Charlotte reflected in her diary: “I often think that this cannot be the eighteenth century in which we live at present for Ancient History can hardly produce anything more Barbarous and Cruel than Our Neighbours in France.” She cheered herself up by reading a history of the reign of the absolutist Louis XIV, when things had been done so much better.
The Queen’s role as scapegoat for the weaknesses and failures of the monarchy as a whole had never been more evident.
The real work of destruction had been done long before by satire, libel and rumour; Marie Antoinette had become dehumanized. The actual assault by a body of people inspiring each other with their bloodthirsty frenzy was the culmination of the process, not the start of it.
Marie Antoinette could not speak. She was imprisoned in her own silent world of agony. But Elisabeth broke out, amid the piercing cries of the children: “The monsters! They are satisfied now.”
“Unfortunate Princess! My marriage promised her a throne; now, what prospect does it offer her?” LOUIS XVI ON THE EVE OF HIS DEATH, 1793
“I have promised the head of Antoinette. I will go and cut it off myself if there is any delay in giving it to me.”
There is something touching about the fact that in confinement her taste turned to foreign adventures; The Travels of Captain Cook, lent to her by a subsequent jailer, became a favourite. Un Voyage à Venise amused Marie Antoinette because it contained references to people she had known in her youth.4
“Yesterday I did not know who the witnesses were to be,” answered Marie Antoinette. “I was ignorant of what they would say. Well, no one has articulated anything positive against me. I finish by observing that I was only the wife of Louis XVI and I had to conform to his wishes.”
The nature of death by “Celestial Guillotine” or “Sainte Guillotine, protectress of patriots” as contemporaries nicknamed it, was that it was essentially theatrical, a slow procession followed by a quick death.
Every account, every eyewitness, agreed on the unassailable composure with which Marie Antoinette went to her death.
pausing only to apologize to Sanson for stepping on his foot—“I did not do it on purpose.” So she went willingly, even eagerly, to her death.
“This is the moment, Madame, to arm yourself with courage,” the juror Abbé Girard had said, still trying to press his spiritual services upon her in the face of her firm rejection. “Courage!” exclaimed Marie Antoinette. “The moment when my ills are going to end is not the moment when courage is going to fail me.”
The gravediggers took time off to have their lunch, leaving the head and body on the grass unattended. This meant that the future Madame Tussaud was able to sculpt the Queen’s lifeless face in wax; unlike her impression of the Princesse de Lamballe, however, this model was never exhibited.
“I will never be happy here. I can feel the Queen’s ghost asking what I am doing in her bed.” Thus spoke Josephine, wife of the then First Consul Napoleon when he decided to move into the Tuileries in 1800.
“This prison can now serve as the laboratory of a new experience; to look without passion at the symbols of murders long past.” Looking without passion is always a good plan where history is concerned.
Marie Antoinette, who was recently estimated to be, with Napoleon, “the most famous figure in the entire length and breadth of French history from Joan of Arc to Charles de Gaulle,” continues to have her passionate admirers and her equally vehement detractors.
Undoubtedly it is the death of Marie Antoinette that casts a glow of nobility over her life story.
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.
Marie Antoinette was suspected by the French of exerting exactly the kind of petticoat influence that the Austrians criticized her for neglecting.
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.
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.
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 the charge.
