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However, ‘the finest kingdom in Europe’ that Louis-Auguste and Marie-Antoinette had inherited was not all that it appeared. The visible outward signs of great wealth that greeted them every day in the sheer size and opulence of Versailles disguised a huge national debt. Their predecessors, Louis XIV and Louis XV, had pursued policies that had driven France to the verge of bankruptcy. A succession of expensive wars had aggravated the problem. In the War of Austrian Succession, spanning 1740 to 1748, France had fought as an ally of Prussia against Austria, the Netherlands and Britain. Eight years later, between 1756 and 1763, Louis XV reversed France’s historic hostility to Austria by allying with them against Britain and Prussia in the Seven Years’ War. These two wars alone cost France 2.8 billion livres (around twenty-four livres to the pound), much of which could only be paid by borrowing.
These problems were compounded by an ancient system of taxation that exacted more from the poor than the rich. The fast-growing population of France was divided into three ‘estates’. The First Estate consisted of around one hundred thousand clergy. The Second Estate comprised almost half a million nobility. The Third Estate were the commoners, the vast majority of the population, consisting of the peasants, wage earners and bourgeoisie. Under this increasingly despised system, the first two estates, the clergy and nobility, were largely exempt from taxes, even though they were the wealthiest. They also enjoyed traditional privileges over the Third Estate, whose members could rarely achieve high rank, such as officer, in the army.
As a result of tax exemptions for the nobility and clergy, the tax base was small and fell disproportionately on those least able to pay. Louis XV had repeatedly failed to tackle the problem of tax reform; time and time again, he faced opposition from nobles and clergy who were not going to give up their tax concessions. Since he could not raise money by increasing taxation, he was obliged to borrow still more. By the 1770s the government deficit was huge and growing, as annual expenditure continued to exceed revenue.
The unjust system of taxation underlined huge disparities in wealth. Peasants felt increasingly insecure as many found that their incomes were dwindling and their debts were rising. Their problems were compounded by the fact that France was still almost entirely an agricultural nation. Only around half a million people produced manufactured goods, so there were few exports to cover the cost of imports of wheat when the harvest failed. One traveller, François de la Rochefoucauld, commenting on the incredible hardships of the peasants he observed in Brittany, declared, ‘they really are slaves … their poverty is excessive. They eat a sort of porridge made of buckwheat; it is more like glue than food’. Indeed, the extreme wealth of the nobles in their magnificent chateaux in contrast to the wretched poverty of many of the people could not have been more plain for all to see.
In eighteenth-century France there was no institutional framework that would readily allow Louis XVI to tackle these fundamental problems. Administratively it was a fragmented nation, each region with completely separate customs, taxes, even different measurements and weights. Each region jealously protected its own interests and independence, which had grown up around local parlements, thirteen in all. These parlements were not like the English parliament of elected representatives. They were lawcourts of magistrates and lawyers who had paid for their seats, and who used them, not to represent the people, but principally to further their own interests. Although the king could formally overrule a parlement or dissolve it, conflicts with the parlements had been a feature of Louis XV’s reign and had stifled modernising reforms.
As Absolute Monarch, the king had authority over the military and the national system of justice, and could determine levels of taxation and influence the clergy. The difficulty was in exercising this power when the country was politically divided. Louis XVI faced a situation where no section of society was satisfied. The nobles wanted to restore ancient rights and to resist any tax changes, the bourgeoisie resented the privileges of the nobles, and the commoners criticised the tax system. The British ambassador, Lord David Murray Stormont, captured the difficulties: ‘every instrument of faction, every court engine is constantly at work, and the whole is such a scene of jealousy, cabal and intrigue that no enemy need wish it more.’ As a young, rather idealistic man, Louis XVI earnestly wished to enhance the reputation of the monarchy and build a more prosperous France, yet he knew this would require major unpopular reforms.
One of the king’s first priorities was to cut back the nation’s debt. To do this he had to reduce state expenditure, starting with Versailles. Versailles just soaked up money; the palace was in need of repair and some servants had not been paid for years. Even before he was king, Louis spent nearly a quarter of his allowance in back payment to staff. He continued to be strict about the royal family’s spending and repaying debts. Provence, Artois and their wives were ordered to eat with him and the queen at Versailles to minimise demands on their own expensive households, and he discouraged the many extravagant noblemen at court from living beyond their means.
He appointed as finance minister Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, who tried to increase state revenue by stimulating the economy. He removed restrictions on the grain trade between the thirteen different regions and promoted light industry by suppressing the powerful guilds which would not allow non-members to practise a trade. This was achieved with some success. Louis was also able to introduce other reforms. He passed measures to improve the appalling state of prisons in France and abolished the barbaric practice of torturing accused prisoners which, up until then, had been regarded as a legitimate means to get at the truth of a man’s innocence or guilt. However, for all his humanitarian instincts, he failed to get to grips with tax reform, and the nation’s debt continued to rise.
While Louis XVI was trying to come to terms with his role as king, Marie-Antoinette was creating her new life as queen. She quickly understood that she was barred from politics but soon found there were other ways of exercising her power at Versailles. As Dauphine she had made no secret of the fact that she disliked the time-consuming, exacting etiquette and formality of the French court where, she felt, her life was lived ‘in front of the whole world’. Depending on their rank, courtiers could attend the rising or lever of the monarch and his family, and in the evening the ceremony for undressing, or coucher. For the all too frequent public meals, or grand couvert, the royal family could be watched dining by any member of the public who was suitably attired.
The queen’s disregard for ceremony shocked the more traditional courtiers in Versailles, who observed her on occasion to yawn or giggle during an event, perhaps disguising her expression with her fan. Needless to say, the young queen was continually reproved by her advisor on social etiquette, Madame de Noailles. Yet ‘Madame Etiquette’, as Marie-Antoinette called her, failed to inspire her protégée with the significance of these rituals. ‘Madame de Noailles held herself bolt upright with a most severe face,’ observed Madame Campan, and ‘merely succeeded in boring the young princess.’ It wasn’t long before Madame Etiquette lost her post altogether and this was followed by many relaxations in court ceremony. Madame Campan, who had lived at Versailles since her youth when she was employed as reader to the princesses of Louis XV, was concerned at the harm this might do her mistress: ‘an inclination to substitute by degrees the simple customs of Vienna for those of Versailles, proved more injurious to her than she could have possibly imagined.’ Her insensitivity to the French way of doing things was adding to the slowly creeping distrust of a foreign queen.
As Marie-Antoinette gained confidence, she began to place her own stamp on court life. She soon found she could patronise friends of her own choosing, such as the Princesse de Lamballe, of the house of Savoy. They had become friends at a winter sledge party, where, according to Madame Campan, the princess, ‘with all the brilliancy and freshness of youth, looked like Spring peeping from under sable and ermine’. Lamballe had been widowed at nineteen, when her husband died of syphilis. Marie-Antoinette found in her a sensitive confidante and soon appointed her Superintendent of the Queen’s Household, a move that caused uproar since there were others whose rank made them much more suited for the post. Unlike the Princesse de Lamballe, another intimate friend, Gabrielle de Polignac, was drawn from the impoverished nobility. Gabrielle was a generous-spirited, level-headed girl with a taste for simplicity. The queen found her husband an official position at Versailles so that Gabrielle, too, could live at the court. It wasn’t long before the queen was bestowing favours to numerous other members of the Polignac family.
With her newfound friends, Marie-Antoinette’s life became more fun and increasingly indulgent: a whirlwind of masked balls, plays and operas in Paris, race meetings and hunting parties. Even Madame Campan, who invariably writes appreciatively of her mistress, was critical. ‘Pleasure was the sole pursuit of everyone of this young family, with the exception of the king,’ she wrote. ‘Their love of it was perpetually encouraged by a crowd of those officious people, who by anticipating their desires … hoped to gain or secure favour for themselves.’ Who would have dared, she asks, to check the amusements of this young, lively and handsome queen? ‘A mother or husband alone, had the right to do it!’ Although the king rarely joined her for these social events, he threw no impediment in her way. ‘His long indifference had been followed by feelings of admiration and love. He was a slave to all the wishes of the queen.’ However, her mother, hearing of these indulgences, was quick to warn Marie-Antoinette in frequent letters from Austria: ‘I foresee nothing but grief and misery for you.’
Gambling soon became another irresistible occupation for the young queen, who managed to accumulate heavy debts, which her husband settled from his private income. Constantly frugal himself, Louis failed to impose this self-discipline on his young wife. Worse criticism was to come when she began to ring up bills for diamonds, followed by more diamonds, in increasing size and quantity, until her mother wrote in some distraction: ‘a Queen can only degrade herself by such impossible behaviour and degrades herself even more by this sort of heedless extravagance, especially in difficult times … I hope I shall not live to see the disaster which is all too likely to occur.’ Marie-Antoinette replied, ‘I would not have thought anyone could have bothered you about such bagatelles.’
Inevitably all this played into the hands of the rumour-mongers. Malicious gossip soon spread about how much money the queen was spending. Apart from jewels and clothes – around 170 creations a year – not to mention her famous hairdresser, Léonard Hautier, who came out from Paris each day to create a powdered, coiffured fantasy up to three feet high, she also lavished money on the Petit Trianon. This was an elegant neoclassical pavilion about a mile from Versailles given to her by the king, which she refurbished to her own taste, including the creation of an English-style garden. This little private heaven was a place where Marie-Antoinette could escape the suffocating etiquette of court and enjoy being informal with her friends; but of course, the money poured into the Petit Trianon, together with enormous sums spent on generously favouring her friends, created jealousy and hostility amongst those who were not so favoured. Courtiers frustrated not to be part of her inner circle maliciously called the Petit Trianon ‘Little Vienna’.
Marie-Antoinette’s Austrian blood still rankled with many in France. All too many nobles had had relatives killed by Austrians in recent wars or at least had fought against Austrian troops. The queen’s apparent contempt for French customs soon made her enemies among the nobility. ‘Apart from a few favourites … everyone was excluded from the royal presence,’ complained one nobleman, the Duc de Lévis-Mirepoix. ‘Rank, service, reputation, and birth were no longer enough to gain admittance.’ Some nobles, he said, stayed away from Versailles rather than endure snubs from such a young, apparently light-headed and frivolous foreigner.
Yet she was not without admirers; she particularly cultivated the good-looking and fashionable men, such as the king’s youngest brother, Artois. With his cosmopolitan air and ease with women, he was only too happy to oblige the king and escort the queen to countless social events. On one occasion, in January 1774, at a masquerade at the opera in Paris, through her grey velvet mask Marie-Antoinette found herself talking to a tall, attractive man with a somewhat serious expression. He was finishing a European grand tour and, as he talked, she realised he had a delightful Swedish accent. Always drawn to a foreigner, she became interested in this aristocratic stranger who was so at ease in Parisian high society. The glamorous Count Axel Fersen made an instant impression.
Not surprisingly, her relationship with her husband was under strain. Anxious about his new role as king, he seemed intimidated by this sophisticated and beautiful wife whom he could not satisfy. ‘The king fears her, rather than loves her,’ observed one courtier, who noticed the king seemed much happier and more relaxed when she was absent. Marie-Antoinette, in turn, chose the company of young men full of energy and wit who would flatter and amuse her; she found it difficult to be patient with such a dull and unexciting husband. Yet they both wanted the marriage to succeed and, in particular, they both wanted an heir.
However, as the years passed, no heir was produced, which incited much malicious gossip. In the autumn of 1775, five years into the marriage, Parisian women were heard shouting revolting obscenities at Marie-Antoinette at a race meeting, mocking her for not giving birth to a dauphin. In the same year she wrote to her mother to tell her about the birth of Artois’ first son, the Duc d’Angoulême, now third in line to the throne. ‘There’s no need to tell you, dear Mama, how much it hurts me to see an heir to the throne who isn’t mine.’ Despite this pressure, Louis remained, to say the least, rather uninterested in sex. The best doctors were consulted and various diagnoses were made, although no serious impediment to the match was found. Marie-Antoinette told her mother that she tried to entice her husband to spend more time with her, and reported enthusiastically early in 1776 that ‘his body seemed to be becoming firmer’.
The empress, however, required much more than this to seal the all-important political alliance. The following year, in April 1777, Marie-Antoinette’s brother, now the Emperor Joseph, came to visit Versailles, charged, amongst other things, with trying to ascertain why no heir was forthcoming. Joseph was enchanted with his sister, whom he described as ‘delightful … a little young and inclined to be rash, but with a core of honesty and virtue that deserves respect’. It would appear from Joseph’s private letters afterwards to his brother Leopold of Tuscany that during his six-week stay he did not shrink from probing the intimate details of their marriage: ‘In the conjugal bed, here is the secret. He [Louis] has excellent erections, inserts his organ, remains there without stirring for perhaps two minutes, and then withdraws without ever discharging and, still erect, he bids his wife goodnight. It is incomprehensible.’ Joseph continued, ‘he ought to be whipped, to make him ejaculate, as one whips donkeys!’ As for Marie-Antoinette, he wrote that she was not ‘amorously inclined’, and together they were ‘a couple of awkward duffers!’
Joseph reproved his sister for not showing her husband more affection. ‘Aren’t you cold and disinterested when he caresses you or tries to speak to you?’ he challenged her. ‘Don’t you look bored, even disgusted? If it’s true, then how can you possibly expect such a cold-blooded man to make love to you?’ Marie-Antoinette evidently took his advice to heart. That summer she was elated to tell her mother that at last she had experienced ‘the happiness so essential for my entire life’. The king and queen’s sexual awakening brought them closer together and, early the following year, she reported that ‘the king spends three or four nights a week in my bed and behaves in a way that fills me with hope’. Some weeks later Marie-Antoinette proudly announced to her husband that she was at last expecting a baby. Louis was overjoyed.
On 19 December 1778 Marie-Antoinette went into labour. At Versailles a royal birth, like eating or dressing, was a public ritual, open to spectators who wished to satisfy themselves that the new baby was born to the queen. As the bells rang out, ‘torrents of inquisitive persons poured into the chamber’, wrote Madame Campan. The rush was ‘so great and tumultuous’ that it was impossible to move; some courtiers were even standing on the furniture. ‘So motley a gathering,’ protested the First Lady of the Bedchamber, ‘one would have thought oneself in a place of public amusement!’ Finally, when the baby was born, there was no sound, and Marie-Antoinette began to panic, thinking it was stillborn. At the first cry, the queen was so elated and exhausted by the effort that she was quite overcome. ‘Help me, I’m dying,’ she cried as she turned very pale and lost consciousness.
Princesse de Lamballe, horrified by the agony of her friend, also collapsed and was taken out ‘insensible’. The windows, which had been sealed to keep out draughts, were hurriedly broken to get more air, courtiers were thrown out, the queen was bled, hot water fetched. It took some time for the queen to regain consciousness. At this point ‘we were all embracing each other and shedding tears of joy’, writes Madame Campan, caught up in ‘transports of delight’ that the queen ‘was restored to life’. A twenty-one-gun salute rang out to announce the birth of a daughter: Princess Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte or Madame Royale. ‘Poor little girl,’ the queen is reported to have said as she cradled her daughter. ‘You are not what was desired, but you are no less dear to me on that account. A son would have been the property of the state. You shall be mine.’
Despite this success, there was still great pressure on Marie-Antoinette to conceive a male heir. To her delight, early in 1781 she found she was pregnant again. After the traumas of Marie-Thérèse’s very public delivery, spectators were banned from the next birth. In fact there was such deep silence in the room as the newborn emerged that the queen imagined she had again only produced a daughter. Then the king, overwhelmed with pride and delight, ‘tears streaming from his eyes’, came up to the queen and said, ‘Madam, you have fulfilled my wishes and those of France. You are the mother of a dauphin.’
A hundred and one cannon heralded the long-awaited birth of a son: Louis-Joseph. The news was greeted by wild celebrations: fireworks, festivities and fountains of wine in Paris. There was such ‘universal joy’, said Madame Campan, that complete strangers ‘stopped one another in the street and spoke without being acquainted’. A delegation of Parisian artisans and craftsmen came to Versailles with generous gifts for the young child. The king, at last showing confidence, was all smiles, remaining on the balcony a long time to savour the sight and constantly taking the opportunity to say with great pleasure, ‘my son, the Dauphin’. The royal line had an heir and the continuity of the monarchy seemed assured.
Nevertheless, for all the triumphant public displays, the monarchy was being imperceptibly undermined, sinking slowly beneath an ocean of debt. Furthermore, like his forebears, Louis XVI had found himself drawn into policies that added to the debt. He had agreed to provide secret funds to help General Washington’s army in America against Britain and soon sent troops and supplies as well. Support for the American revolution against the British was popular in France. Many wanted to retaliate for the defeats suffered in the Seven Years’ War, such as the Marquis de Lafayette, whose father had been killed by the British. Lafayette set sail for America in 1777 and was soon appointed major general, serving George Washington. His daring exploits were widely reported in France as he led his men in several victorious campaigns.
Louis XVI had found himself increasingly involved in the American war. In 1778 he recognised the American Declaration of Independence and signed a military alliance with the Americans. The eight thousand French soldiers who went to America made a significant difference to the war against England. Much to her disappointment, the queen’s favourite, Count Fersen, was one of many who volunteered to join the French expeditionary corps. However, as the fighting dragged on, the French government was forced to spend heavily to finance the military campaign against England.
A succession of finance ministers came and went, seemingly unable to get to grips with the deficit. Instead of reforming the tax system, Louis tried to solve the problem without alienating the aristocracy. Each year he was forced to borrow more to balance the budget, sinking further and further into debt. When his reforming finance minister, Turgot, tried to change this, he became so unpopular at court, especially with Marie-Antoinette, that he was dismissed.
His successor, Jacques Necker, a Swiss banker appointed in June 1777, attempted to reorganise the tax system but soon became embroiled in further borrowing at increasingly exorbitant interest rates. In 1781, in an attempt to win the confidence of creditors, he published the Compte Rendu, a highly favourable report of the state finances. His ambitious plan failed. His figures were challenged and in the ensuing furor, finding that he did not have the full support of Louis XVI, he resigned.
He was succeeded in 1783 by his rival, Charles Alexandre de Calonne. Calonne tried to tackle the problem by boosting the economy with increased state spending, especially on manufacturing. This only served to deepen the crisis and he was forced to contemplate further taxes. To add to the difficulties, a long agricultural depression gripped the country and inflation was rising. All this was exacerbated by the effects of the American war. Although the French secured a victory against England in the American War of Independence, aid to the Americans between 1776 and 1783 had added around 1.3 billion livres to the spiralling national debt. And there was another hidden cost of supporting America: the returning men, inspired by what they had seen overseas, brought back revolutionary ideas.
During the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century France, writers like François Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau had set out radical new ideas in political philosophy. Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters of 1733 indicted the French system of government and were suppressed. He continued to challenge all manifestations of tyranny by the privileged few in church or state. Rousseau’s The Social Contract, published in 1762, tackled the great themes of liberty and virtue and the role of the state, creating a new sense of possibilities and opportunities. Intellectuals began to reject established systems of government; ‘reason’, they argued, had greater value than the king’s claim to a ‘divine right’, and they no longer saw the monarch’s rights and privileges as unchallengeable. Political issues became much more widely debated in the salons and academies of Paris. Why support a system that had the great mass of the populace in chains to abject poverty? Surely the people, rather than the king, should determine levels of taxation? Is a republic morally superior to a monarchy? Educated Frenchmen began to see in America’s Declaration of Independence a better model to follow. With the establishment of the American constitution there was a practical alternative to the monarchy of France.
Growing discontent with the government found a tangible focus in the popular press in the increasingly vitriolic portrayal of the queen. Although with the responsibilities of motherhood she had begun to moderate her earlier excesses and spent much time with her children, she had many enemies at court and the slanders continued unabated. In the streets of Paris, pornography, cartoons, prints and libelles poured out an endless barrage of spiteful criticism which, before long, became common truths throughout France. The production of these pamphlets was a commercial enterprise and writers fought to outdo each other in their ever more outrageous copy. The queen was portrayed as wildly frivolous and extravagant, with no care for the welfare of her people. Much was made of her seven years of childlessness and she was accused of lesbian relationships, especially with her favourites, Gabrielle de Polignac and the Superintendent of the Household, Princesse de Lamballe: ‘In order to have children, Cupid must widen Aphrodite’s door. This Antoinette knows, and she tires out more than one work lady widening that door. What talents are employed! The Superintendent works away. Laughter, games, little fingers, all her exploits proved in vain.’
Even when she fulfilled her role as mother, Marie-Antoinette was portrayed as unfaithful, turning the king of France into a ‘perfect cuckold’.
Our lascivious Queen
With Artois the debauched
Together with no trouble
Commit the sweet sin
But what of it
How could one find harm in that?
These calumnies demonising the queen became increasingly explicit and obscene. The Love Life of Charlie and Toinette, of 1779, outlines in graphic detail the ‘impotence of L— —’ whose ‘matchstick … is always limp and curled up’, and how ‘Toinette feels how sweet it is to be well and truly fucked’ by Artois. In the pamphlets and libelles, the queen’s voracious sexual appetite required more than one lover: Fersen, Artois and others were implicated. There was even a fake autobiography, A Historical Essay on the Life of Marie-Antoinette, which first appeared in the early 1780s and proved so popular it was continually updated, purporting to be her own confession as a ‘barbaric queen, adulterous wife, woman without morals, soiled with crime and debauchery, these are the titles that are my decorations’. Yet for many her worst crime was undeniable: she was Austrian. To the gutter press of Paris, in addition to all her other failings, she was invariably l’Autrichienne, stressing the second half of the word, chienne or ‘bitch’.
In March 1785 Marie-Antoinette had a second son, Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie. Could Count Axel Fersen have fathered this child, as some historians have suggested? He was the only man out of the many named in the libelles with whom the queen might have had an affair. There is no doubt of their mutual attraction, yet historians cannot agree over the nature of their relationship. Was this a courtly romance, where Fersen discreetly adored the queen from a distance? Or was this a romantic passion with many secret rendezvous in the privacy of her gardens at Trianon? The many deletions in Marie-Antoinette’s correspondence with Fersen, made years later by the Fersen family, make the matter impossible to resolve. The most likely conclusion is that, although it is probable that they had an affair, there is no evidence that Louis XVI was not Louis-Charles’ father. Quite the reverse: courtiers noted that the date of conception did indeed neatly coincide with the dates of the king’s visits to his wife’s bedroom.
However, so successfully had lampoonists demolished the queen’s reputation that when she made her traditional ceremonial entry into Paris after the birth of her second son, there was not a single cheer from the crowd. As she walked though the dark interior of Notre Dame towards the great sunlit western door and square beyond, the awesome silence of the crowd was the menacing backdrop as the clatter of horses’ hooves rang out in the spring air. It was in stark contrast to the tumultuous celebrations that had greeted her on her arrival in Paris as a young girl. The queen was distraught by this hostility, crying out as she returned to Versailles, ‘What have I done to them?’
She could no longer turn to her mother in Austria for advice. The Empress Maria-Theresa never had the satisfaction of knowing that her daughter had finally provided two male heirs. After a short illness, she had died of inflammation of the lungs. Marie-Antoinette was inconsolable, reported Madame Campan. ‘She kept herself shut up in her closet for several days … saw none but the royal family, and received none but the Princesse de Lamballe and the Duchesse de Polignac.’ Even at a distance, her mother had been a powerful influence in her life, constantly providing shrewd and critical guidance. She felt her isolation now, in a foreign court, with all the responsibilities of queen, wife and mother.
Marie-Antoinette did have one treasured memento of her mother, a lock of her hair, which she wore close to her skin. And in Austria, concealed in the empress’s rosary, there was a small token of her distant daughter. The delicate chain of black rosary beads was entwined with sixteen gold medallions encasing locks of hair from her children. After her death, the rosary passed to her oldest daughter, the invalid, Maria-Anna, who lived in the Elisabethinen convent in Klagenfurt. These small symbols of the empress’s children were all but forgotten. In time, they would assume great significance.
2 ‘GRÂCE POUR MAMAN’ (#ulink_8acac720-6a82-53e3-8014-7147e5733f1d)
‘This is a revolt?’ asked the king, hearing of the fall of the Bastille.
‘No sire, it is a revolution,’ came the reply.
Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt (July 1789)
At Versailles, Louis-Charles, the Duc de Normandie, lived a charmed life, well protected from the ‘trifling disturbances’ – as they were sometimes known at court – beyond the palace gates. In the royal nursery, under the sensitive administration of the Governess of the Children of France, the Duchesse de Polignac, his little empire was well endowed with servants. Apart from Cecile, his wet nurse, there was a cradle rocker, Madame Rambaud, and his personal rocker, Madame Rousseau, otherwise known as ‘Rocker to the Children of France’, whose sister, Madame Campan, worked in the Queen’s Household. Valets were appointed such as Hanet Cléry, a particularly loyal and discreet servant who had been in service to the royal family since 1782. In addition, the Duc de Normandie had two room boys, four ushers, a porter, a silver cleaner, a laundress, a hairdresser, two first chamber women, eight ordinary women and a periphery of minor staff all vying for importance.
The nursery on the ground floor of Versailles opened out onto the large terraces and acres of ornamental gardens beyond; rows of orange trees and neatly trimmed box bushes receded into the distance, geometrically arranged around circular pools with tall fountains cascading onto statues, gilded each year. Any infant tumble from the prince as he took his first steps would bring a kaleidoscope of riches to view; wherever he looked, his soft and silken world was perfect. His mother watched his excellent progress with delight. Louis-Charles was glowing with vitality, ‘a real peasant boy, big, rosy and plump’, she wrote. This contrasted sharply with his brother, Monsieur le Dauphin, who although more than three years older was constantly prone to infections.
Monsieur le Dauphin was eventually moved out of the nursery and established in his own official suite on the ground floor of Versailles, ousting his Uncle Provence. His older sister, Madame Royale, also had her own apartment near Marie-Antoinette, under the Hall of Mirrors. Apart from occasional state duties, such as the grand couvert, where they would dine in public – Madame Royale with her hair powdered and wearing a stiff panniered gown, the Duc de Normandie usually sitting on his mother’s lap – their lives were shielded from the public. The Duc de Normandie was taken on carriage trips around the park and visits to the farm at the Trianon, or he could play in his little garden on the terrace. Occasionally there would be trips to nearby palaces at Marly, Saint Cloud or Fontainebleau.
None the less, the ‘gilded youth’ of Versailles, in the words of one nobleman, the Comte de Ségur, walked ‘upon a carpet of flowers which covered an abyss’. France’s deepening financial crisis was beginning to dominate public life. In 1787 interest on the national debt alone had risen to almost half of all state expenditure. Louis and his finance minister, Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, were fast approaching a point where it was no longer possible to borrow more money except at excessive interest rates. They faced no alternative but to raise taxes.
Calonne, like his predecessors, urged the king to reform the tax system and abolish the partial exemption from direct taxation enjoyed by the nobility and clergy. The king, always anxious to create a consensus for change rather than appear to act as autocratic leader, wanted to introduce Calonne’s reforms without confrontation. Consequently, rather than present his proposals to the parlements – which he knew would be hostile – he decided to take a chance and call a special ‘Assembly of Notables’ composed of leading figures in society, hand-picked for the occasion.
However, when the Assembly of Notables gathered in Versailles in February 1787, far from accepting and popularising the tax reforms as the king had hoped, they were suspicious. The clergy and nobles, who owned most of the land, were largely exempt from the principal land tax, the taille, yet under the new measures they would pay up to five per cent of their own income. As news spread of the proposed tax reforms and soaring deficit, Calonne became the focus of the passionate criticism. In Paris his effigy was burned in the streets. By April 1787 the king was forced to dismiss his unpopular minister, and the following month he dissolved the Assembly of Notables.
His new finance minister, Loménie de Brienne, prepared a revised package of tax reforms and boldly decided he would try to win approval directly from the Parlement of Paris. However, the Parlement, like the Assembly of Notables, rejected the equalisation of taxation. Ironically, this revolutionary measure, which would have benefited the vast majority of people, was perceived to be an act of despotism by the monarchy. Since the king had to raise money somehow, to pay staff and honour debts, he was becoming increasingly desperate. In August 1787 he exiled the entire Parlement of Paris to the country at Troyes. This caused uproar; there were demonstrations in Paris and crowds gathered outside Parlement crying for ‘liberty’. Although Louis had reduced court spending, the proposed increases in taxes for the nobles and clergy were inextricably linked in the public’s mind with the demands made by the royal family on the public purse to fund their extravagant lifestyle. The public’s growing hostility began to focus on Louis and, inevitably, his Austrian wife, Marie-Antoinette.
A large diamond necklace would prove the queen’s undoing: 647 brilliants, 2,800 carats, arranged in glittering layer upon layer, a piece of jewellery to dazzle the eye and empty the purse. It was the dream creation of the court jewellers, Böhmer and Bassenge, and they hoped to sell this diamond fantasy to Marie-Antoinette. To their disappointment, by the late 1780s the ‘Queen of the Rococo’ was now much more restrained; she repeatedly refused to buy the necklace.
Böhmer would not give up. He offered his 1.6 million livres ‘superb necklace’ to the king, hoping he would buy it for Marie-Antoinette. The king, it seems, was not in a necklace-buying mood. Faced with constant if polite refusals, the worried Böhmer, increasingly looking bankruptcy in the eye, decided on a rather theatrical appeal to the queen and waylaid her at court. ‘Madame, I am ruined and disgraced if you do not purchase my necklace,’ he cried as he threw himself on his knees. ‘I shall throw myself into the river.’ The queen spoke to him severely: ‘Rise, Böhmer. I do not like these rhapsodies.’ She urged him to break up the necklace and sell the stones separately.
It was the queen’s misfortune that the grand almoner of France, one Cardinal de Rohan, had long dreamed of enhancing his standing with the royal family. The cardinal fell prey to a con artist posing as a friend of the queen, a certain charming Comtesse Jeanne de La Motte-Valois. Knowing that the cardinal wished to ingratiate himself and be part of the queen’s elite circle, Jeanne de La Motte hired a woman to dress like Marie-Antoinette and meet him secretly one night in the palace grounds. This false queen pressed a rose into the cardinal’s hand and hurried away, leaving him under the delightful impression that he had indeed met with the queen’s favour.
Encouraged by this, when Jeanne de La Motte told the cardinal that the queen wished him to purchase Böhmer’s famous necklace on her behalf, he obligingly did so. He duly passed the fabulous necklace to Jeanne de La Motte, who went to London post-haste to make her fortune as the gems emerged in brooches, ear-rings, snuff boxes and other trifles.
There was just the outstanding sum of 1.6 million livres. When the court jewellers demanded payment, the shocking scandal began to unravel. The king arrested the cardinal and he was sent to the Bastille, only to be tried and acquitted of theft later before a sympathetic parlement. There were cries of ‘Vive le cardinal!’ in the streets, expressing the people’s view that he was the foolish victim of a ‘tyrant’ king. Eventually brought to justice, Jeanne de La Motte was sent to the prison of La Salpêtrière and condemned to a public flogging. She was to be branded with a V for voleuse (‘thief’) on her shoulder. In front of a huge crowd, the iron rod slipped as she struggled and she was burned on the breast. She too successfully portrayed herself as victim in the ‘Diamond Necklace Affair’ in her memoirs, in which she claimed only to have confessed to the theft to protect the queen, with whom she had had an affair.
Although Marie-Antoinette was entirely innocent, as the unbelievable saga unfolded before the amazed public in the late 1780s, it was her reputation that became the most sullied. Her love of beautiful jewels had been widely reported. It was easy to believe that she had accepted the necklace, refused to pay for it and then spitefully passed the blame onto others. Under the relentless onslaught of outrageous libelles that poured onto the streets of Paris, her image became irrevocably tarnished. It was claimed that she and her favoured friends continued to spend recklessly and that she had handed over millions of livres to her Austrian family.
She was portrayed as the real power behind the throne who pushed Austrian interests on a weak king. The degree to which she was seen as out of touch with the realities of the poor came when she was attributed as saying ‘Let them eat cake’ when bread was in short supply. There is no evidence that she said this; the remark is more likely to have been made a century before, by Louis XIV’s queen. Yet the queen began to receive pointed demonstrations of disapproval when she ventured out in public. Trips into Paris could turn quickly into frightening undertakings.
With France teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and the king demanding yet more taxes, the queen began to emerge as the prime culprit. The ‘Austrian whore’ or ‘Austrian bitch’ was transformed into the root cause of the country’s financial plight. At a watershed in the destruction of her image she was dubbed the wildly extravagant ‘Madame Déficit’. Owing to her unpopularity, her latest portrait was not hung in the Royal Academy of Paris. In the blank frame remaining, someone had written: ‘Behold the Deficit!’
The once pleasure-loving queen retreated from public gaze. Occasional rides into the country around the Trianon with Count Axel Fersen were among the few consolations at a time when she was increasingly preoccupied with motherhood. In the summer of 1787 her fourth child, Sophie, born the year before, died suddenly from tuberculosis. As she struggled with this loss, it was becoming increasingly evident that the Dauphin, too, was showing signs of tuberculosis. He began to lose weight and suffered attacks of fever.
As the autumn and winter months wore on, the king was losing control of the political situation. Under continued financial pressure, Louis recalled the Parlement. However, the king’s insistence that he wanted a fairer system of taxation fell on deaf ears. He seemed unable to get his message across, and was even opposed by his own distant cousin, the scheming Philippe d’Orléans, head of the Orléanist line of the Bourbon family. It was becoming clear to Louis that the tax issue was being used as a pretext for a wider challenge to his authority as the king. A system of rule that had existed in France for generations was now at risk. At stake was not just balancing the budget and pushing through a fairer system of taxation, but more fundamentally who had the right to take these decisions and govern France. Determined to re-establish his authority, on 8 May 1788 Louis gambled yet again. He suspended not only the Parlement of Paris but also the other twelve provincial Parlements as well. This prompted a wave of rioting across France. There was an outpouring of support for the parlements and all sections of society seemed ranged against a king who was increasingly portrayed as a tyrant. Louis began to doubt his own ability and, according to his youngest sister, Madame Elisabeth, was racked with indecision. ‘My brother has such good intentions,’ she wrote, ‘but fears always to make a mistake. His first impulse over, he is tormented by the dread of doing an injustice.’ Both he and his finance minister became ill with the stress as the government’s financial position continued to deteriorate. Many people refused to pay any taxes at all until the king backed down. Loménie de Brienne, now unable to raise money either by credit or taxes, was obliged to print money to pay government staff. It was, in effect, an admission of bankruptcy. He was losing command of the situation and by August he was fired.
In the hope of bringing order to the disintegrating condition of the state, Louis came under increasing pressure to summon an ancient institution known as the Estates-General. This comprised elected representatives of three great medieval orders or estates: the clergy, the nobles and the commoners. The Estates-General was only summoned in times of crisis; Louis was only too aware that such a meeting might undermine his authority still further. The last time the Estates-General had sat, in 1614, they had only become a forum for disagreement and conflict. Yet the whole nation seemed to be demanding its recall. In late August, responding to popular demand, he reappointed his former finance minister, Jacques Necker. Lurching from one policy to another, increasingly unable to stave off bankruptcy, Louis became trapped. Finally, he agreed to summon the Estates-General to Versailles the following year. It was a desperate gamble.
When the Estates-General had last met 174 years previously, it had had an equal number of representatives from each estate, in which the First Estate, the clergy, and the Second Estate, the nobility, could always combine together to outvote the Third Estate, the commoners. When the restored parlement demanded the same arrangement this time, there was outrage and further riots. Louis decided to right this imbalance by giving the commoners as many representatives as the nobility and clergy together, but he neglected to say whether the voting would be by ‘order’ or by head. What had initially begun as a protest by the clergy and nobles against the powers of the king to raise their taxes had now set in motion a chain of events in which all sections in France sought to exert greater political power. Even the elements seemed ranged against Louis. A very bad harvest was followed in 1788 by a viciously cruel winter in which many of the poor died of cold or starvation. Unrest was growing; robber bands pillaged the countryside. To many ordinary people the whole system in France seemed rotten; feelings against the king and queen hardened as deeply felt grievances were aired.
As the debates raged about the Estates-General, Marie-Antoinette watched anxiously over the declining health of her eldest son. ‘The young Prince fell, in a few months, from rude health into a condition which curved his spine, distorted and lengthened his face, and rendered his legs so weak that he was unable to walk without being supported like some broken old man,’ wrote Madame Campan. Still only six years old, his little body slowly became pitifully deformed as his tuberculosis spread. ‘He has one leg shorter than the other, and his spine is twisted and sticks out unnaturally,’ the queen confided to her brother, Emperor Joseph II, in February 1788. The next month the Dauphin was sent to the Château de Meudon with his governor, in the hopes that his health would recover with the fresh country air. The king visited his son no less than forty times over the summer months, eagerly looking for any sign of improvement. There was none.
The queen took comfort from her other two children. Marie-Thérèse, the eldest, she nicknamed Mousseline la Sérieuse on account of her serious, thoughtful manner. The Petite Madame took after her father in temperament, although she could be dignified sometimes to the point of seeming haughty. The queen reserved her strongest endearments for her youngest, Louis-Charles: ‘mon chou d’amour’. His blue eyes and blond hair resembled his mother’s and with his affectionate and playful personality he proved a most rewarding child. He enjoyed games of ‘wedding’ in the nursery with his friends and playing with sand or horses – his great aunts had given him eight small black ponies, which had been specially trained so he could ride them. Madame Campan observed, ‘his ruddy health and loveliness did, in truth, form a striking contrast to the languid look and melancholy disposition of his elder brother’. Increasingly the king and queen’s hopes for the future of their line were concentrated on this charming little ruler of the nursery who, at four and a half, was already wearing coat and trousers.
4 May 1789. The streets of Versailles were hung with tapestries for the magnificent opening procession to mark the historic gathering of the Estates-General. With great ceremony to mark this ‘rebirth’ of France – as some believed – the parade of two thousand people filed though the crowded streets for a service at the church of Saint Louis. The king walked behind the archbishop of Paris, followed by the royal family, then representatives of the three estates, each with lighted candles.
Marie-Antoinette, sumptuously bejewelled in a silver dress, ‘looked sad’ as she passed. Unable to take part, but watching the proceedings from a balcony, was her seven-year-old son, his twisted little body stretched on a day bed. She now knew he was dying and could scarcely hold back her tears as he smiled valiantly at her. At that moment some ‘low women’, according to Madame Campan, ‘yelled out “Vive le Duc d’Orléans!” in such a rebellious manner that the queen nearly fainted’. Many of the representatives, she wrote, arrived in Versailles with the ‘strongest prejudices’ against the queen, certain she ‘was draining the treasury of the state in order to satisfy the most unreasonable luxury’. Some demanded to see the Trianon, convinced that there was at least one room ‘totally decorated with diamonds, and columns studded with sapphires and rubies’. Disbelieving representatives searched the pavilion in vain for the diamond chamber.
The first session of the Estates-General met the next day in the opulent surroundings of the Salle des Menus Plaisirs in the palace. The clergy, in imposing scarlet and black ecclesiastical robes, were seated on benches on the right. The nobles, richly dressed in white-feathered hats and gold-trimmed suits, took the benches on the left. The commoners sat furthest from the king at the far end, dressed simply in black. One of those among them taking in the scene – the large ornate chamber, the symbolic ranking of the representatives with the Third Estate in plain clothes at the back – was a young lawyer called Maximilien Robespierre.
At the age of eleven Robespierre had won a scholarship to one of the most prestigious schools in France, Louis-le-Grand, in Paris. He had graduated in law in 1780 and returned to practise in his home town, Arras, in the northern province of Artois. When the Estates-General were summoned, he seized his chance to further his career and successfully secured a position as one of eight Third Estate deputies for Artois. Like many commoners, he arrived in Versailles determined to challenge the structures of privilege at the heart of French society and create social equality.
As the speeches and debates began, the great expectations that had preceded the opening of the Estates-General soon disintegrated. Far from even attempting to resolve the all-important financial crisis, which Necker outlined at great length, there were increasingly bitter arguments about voting procedures, with each estate continually plotting for positions of power over the others. As the weeks of May passed, rather than resolving the issue of tax reform, the meeting served as a catalyst, crystallising grievances at the very heart of the constitution of France.
At this time the queen was almost completely preoccupied with the Dauphin. The young prince suffered as his illness slowly destroyed every trace of childish vitality. When Princesse de Lamballe visited him at Meudon with her lady-in-waiting, they could hardly bear to look at his ‘beautiful eyes, the eyes of a dying child’. The queen watched helplessly as his emaciated body became covered in sores. ‘The things that the poor little one says are incredible; they pierce his mother’s heart; his tenderness towards her knows no bounds,’ observed a friend. On 2 June services were held for him across France and prayers were said. It was to no avail. Two days later he died in his mother’s arms.
The significance of these events was lost on the four-year-old Louis-Charles playing in the nursery at Versailles. He wept to hear of the death of his older brother, now lying in state at Meudon in a silver and white room, his coffin covered with a silver cloth, his crown and sword. All around him, the chambers of Versailles resounded to the acrimonious debates of the deputies. Louis-Charles had now become the symbol of the royal future of France, ‘Monsieur le Dauphin’, next in line to a throne increasingly devoid of authority as well as funds.
The king, somewhere during these events, private and public, missed his opportunity to rally the deputies and inspire their support. Overwhelmed with grief, he and the queen left Versailles to mourn their oldest son. In his absence, the deputies of the Third Estate seized the initiative. At a pivotal meeting on 17 June 1789, they passed a motion that since they represented ninety-five per cent of the people, the Third Estate should be renamed as a new body, called the ‘National Assembly’, which had the right to control taxation. With flagrant disregard for the king they planned to proceed, with or without royal approval.
While the king vacillated, hopelessly torn between the advice of ministers such as Necker who counselled compromise, and that of his wife and brothers who argued for a tougher line, the Third Estate went even further. When the deputies of the new National Assembly found themselves locked out of their usual meeting room, they adjourned to an indoor tennis court. Here each member solemnly swore not to separate until France had a new constitution. This became known as the ‘Tennis Court Oath’.
The king’s power was collapsing. His specially appointed Assembly of Notables had defied him, the Parlement had defied him, now the Third Estate was defying him. With each successive swipe at the monarchy, the king was racked with indecision. ‘All goes worse than ever,’ Madame Elisabeth reported frankly to her friend, the Marquise de Bombelles, as she confided her despair at her brother’s lack of the ‘necessary sternness’. Foreseeing disaster, she wrote, ‘the deputies, victims of their passions … are rushing to ruin, and that of the throne and the whole kingdom’. As for herself, she told the marquise ominously, ‘I have sworn not to leave my brother and I shall keep my oath.’
As support grew rapidly for the new National Assembly, the king was obliged to recognise it. He ordered the other two estates to join the Third. As a result, the commoners, who had had their representation doubled, now held a majority. Many took the Third’s victory and the king’s acquiescence as a sign that his authority had completely broken down. There was rioting on the streets; civil war seemed imminent. The king summoned extra regiments to Paris. He told the deputies of the National Assembly that the troops were stationed as a precaution, to protect the people. The deputies, however, saw the presence of twenty-five thousand troops in and around the capital differently and feared that they themselves were under direct threat from the king. One of them spoke out: ‘these preparations for war are obvious to everyone and fill every heart with indignation.’
On 12 July, following the dismissal of the popular finance minister, Necker, crowds gathered to hear rousing revolutionary speeches against the ‘tyranny’ of the monarchy, who it was feared was seeking to destroy the new National Assembly that represented the people. ‘Citizens, they will stop at nothing,’ urged one speaker, the journalist Camille Desmoulins, a schoolfriend of Robespierre. ‘They are plotting a massacre of patriots.’ People rushed to arm themselves. As a wave of panic swept the Paris streets, armourers and gunsmiths were raided – one later reported that he was looted no less than thirty times. The monastery of Saint Lazare, a depot for grain and flour, was sacked. The next day, at the Hôtel de Ville, Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of the American war, set out to enrol a new ‘National Guard’ with himself as colonel, creating a new citizens’ army. Early the next morning, on 14 July, around eighty thousand people gathered at the Invalides, the army’s barracks, where they overwhelmed the troops and managed to obtain thirty thousand muskets and some cannon. Faced with rumours that royal troops were on the move, the citizens’ army needed gunpowder and this was in the Bastille. The crowd swept forward, to rousing cries of ‘To the Bastille!’
The grey stone walls and menacing towers of this fourteenth-century fortress rose as a great, dark edifice on the Rue Saint Antoine in the eastern side of Paris. For years any enemies of the crown could be detained in this prison without a judicial process, merely by a royal warrant: the notorious lettres de cachet. Consequently, the almost windowless walls, five feet thick, rising sheer from the moat, had come to represent a mighty symbol of royal tyranny and oppression. The cry went up to seize the Bastille, take the gunpowder and release the prisoners. Revolt was fast turning into revolution.
As nine hundred men gathered around the Bastille, the atmosphere inside was tense. The governor, Marquis Bernard-René de Launay, gave orders for his guards to defend the prison at all cost. After midday, the mob broke through the first drawbridge and behind a smoke screen formed by burning two carts of manure, they aimed their guns at the gate and the second drawbridge. With the fortress under siege, the garrison fought back, killing almost one hundred of the assailants and injuring many more. Yet the mob continued to attack. The guards eventually surrendered, defying de Launay’s orders, and lowered the second drawbridge. The crowds, now out of control, surged forward into the fortress, breaking windows and furniture, and killing any guards who had not put down their weapons. The prisoners were released; for all the furor, there were only seven – including one madman.
In their lust for vengeance the excited crowd seized de Launay and dragged him towards the Hôtel de Ville, kicking him down until, unable to endure another moment, he screamed, ‘Let me die!’ As he lashed out, the crowd finished off their victim with hunting knives, swords and bayonets. Finally a cook named Désnot cut off his head with a pocket knife. The still dripping head was twisted onto a pike and paraded around the streets to the cheering crowd, described on a placard as ‘Governor of the Bastille, disloyal and treacherous enemy of the people’. For patriots, the fall of the Bastille created a wave of euphoria, and it would not be long before the prison was demolished entirely.
Faced with this new crisis, the king went to the National Assembly and effectively surrendered, promising to withdraw his troops from Paris. As the sense of desperation grew, many senior members of the Versailles court now fled. On the night of 16 July the king’s young brother, Artois, and the queen’s close friend, Gabrielle de Polignac, left the palace with their families. ‘Nothing could be more affecting than the parting of the queen and her friend,’ wrote Madame Campan. The queen ‘wished to go and embrace her once more’ after they had parted, but knowing that her movements were watched, was too frightened that she might give her friend away. The duchess ‘was disguised as a femme dechambre’, and instead of travelling in the waiting berline, stepped up in front with the coachman, like a servant.
After long discussions with his ministers, the king decided that the royal family would stay at Versailles. Madame Campan saw the queen tear up the papers ordering preparations for departure ‘with tears in her eyes’. She was in no doubt about the danger they faced. In the event of an attack on the palace, they might not even be able to count on the loyalty of the guard at Versailles to protect them. In a bold attempt to defuse the situation, Louis agreed to a request by the National Assembly to visit Paris. Marie-Antoinette begged him not to go. Locked in her rooms with her family, she sent for members of the court, only to find they had already fled. ‘Terror had driven them away,’ said Madame Campan; no one expected the king to return alive. ‘A deadly silence reigned throughout the palace.’
It was dark before the king returned. He had faced the crowd and was now wearing the red, white and blue cockade – soon to be the badge of the revolutionary – as he made his way back to his palace escorted by a citizens’ army. ‘Happily no blood has been shed,’ he told his family, ‘and I swear that never shall a drop of French blood be shed by my order.’
Only five days later Joseph Foulon, one of the ministers brought in to replace Necker, was recognised by the crowd and dragged to the Hôtel de Ville. ‘After tormenting him in a manner the particulars of which make humanity shudder,’ reported Campan, the people hanged him. ‘His body was dragged about the streets and his heart was carried – by women – in the midst of a bunch of white carnations!’ It had been rumoured that Foulon had said, ‘If the rogues haven’t any bread, they can have hay’. Now hay was stuffed in his mouth as his head was thrust on a pike and borne through the streets of Paris.
The terror in Paris ricocheted around the country in a wave of panic known as La Grande Peur. Angry mobs invaded the bastilles at Bordeaux and Caen; fighting broke out in the streets of Lyon, Rennes, Rouen and Saint Malo. With the harvest not yet in, the price of bread soared. Many feared that there was a plot to starve the people into submission. As the poor left their homes to scavenge for food it was widely believed that these vagrants were paid by the nobility to cause disruption and steal bread. Rumours were rife that the food shortages were exacerbated by the stockpiling of grain by the wealthy, including the royal family. As panic spread, peasants invaded the chateaux to exact bloody revenge on their masters.
At Versailles, the queen was increasingly concerned about the safety of her children. Following the departure of Gabrielle de Polignac, she chose as their governess the Marquise de Tourzel, a woman who combined ‘an illustrious ancestry with the most exemplary virtue’, according to the king. However, the marquise hesitated; she had children of her own and was under no illusion as to the ‘perils and responsibilities’ of the post. It was only the ‘spectacle of desertion’ by so many of their friends that persuaded her to accept.
On 24 July the queen wrote to the marquise with practical details of her new charges:
‘My son is two days short of being four years and four months old … His health has always been good, though even in his cradle we noticed that he was very nervous and upset by the slightest sudden noise … Because of delicate nerves he is always frightened by any noise to which he isn’t accustomed and for example, is afraid of dogs after hearing one bark near him.’
Despite these sensitivities, she portrays Louis-Charles as a good-natured child, ‘with no sense of conceit’ although he could, on occasion, be a little thoughtless. His greatest defect, wrote the queen, was his indiscretion: ‘he easily repeats what he has heard; and often without intending to lie, adds things according to his imagination. This is his greatest fault and must be corrected.’
‘My son has no idea of rank in his head and I would like that to continue: our children always find out soon enough who they are. He is very fond of his sister and has a good heart. Every time something makes him happy, a trip somewhere or a gift, his first impulse is to request the same for his sister. He was born cheerful; for his health he needs to be outside a great deal, and I think it is best for him to play and work on the terraces rather than have him go any further. The exercise taken by little children playing and running about in the open air is far healthier than making them go for long walks which often tire their backs.’
The queen instructed her new governess never to let him out of her sight. Finding the virtuous marquise stricter than her predecessor, it wasn’t long before the Dauphin dubbed her ‘Madame Sévère’.
During August 1789 the National Assembly moved quickly to destroy many of the pillars of the ancien régime, the previous or old order of France. On the night of the fourth, in a highly charged and emotional sitting, the nobles and clergy capitulated and agreed to relinquish all feudal privileges. All exemptions from taxation and a multitude of dues that peasants owed their landlords were abolished. It was the overthrow of feudalism. Over the next two weeks the National Assembly went further to try to establish equality throughout France in a ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’. In this declaration, ‘all men [were] born free and equal’ and every citizen had the right to decide what taxes should be imposed. It also set out a definition for fundamental human rights: freedom of speech, freedom from unlawful imprisonment, freedom of the press and religious liberty. The declaration was then given to the king at Versailles for his formal assent. He played for time and delayed approving the documents.
Feeling increasingly vulnerable at Versailles, in mid-September Louis summoned a thousand troops that he knew to be loyal from the northern frontier: the Flanders regiment. According to tradition, the king’s bodyguards held a celebratory dinner to welcome officers of the new regiment to Versailles. On 1 October a lavish banquet was prepared by the royal chef, and set up beneath the gold and blue canopies of the Opera House. ‘There were numerous orchestras in the room,’ says Madame Campan. ‘The rousing air, “O Richard! O mon roi” was played and shouts of “Vive le roi!” shook the roof for several minutes.’
The king and queen, who had not planned to attend, made an unexpected entrance with the Dauphin. Immediately the orchestra struck up. ‘People were intoxicated with joy,’ wrote Madame Campan. ‘On all sides were heard praises of Their Majesties, exclamations of affection, expressions of regret for what they had suffered, clapping of hands and shouts of “Vive le roi!” “Vive la reine!” “Vive le dauphin!”’ A highly charged atmosphere was created, with many tears and with officers dramatically saluting the king with their swords. At one point the young dauphin was lifted onto the horseshoe table at the centre of the stage. Rising to the occasion, he walked the length of the table, smiling at everyone as he carefully picked his way through the fine china and glassware. When the king and queen finally left, the theatre resounded with defiant shouts of ‘Down with the Assembly! Down with the Assembly!’ Yet there were spies everywhere and reports of the grand banquet spread like fire around Paris.
It was an incendiary piece of news: while people were almost starving in Paris, banquets were apparently being organised for counter-revolutionaries in Versailles. Reports became wildly exaggerated. The feast was no less than an orgy at which red, white and blue cockades were crushed underfoot, to gleeful shouts of ‘Down with the nation!’ Did not the queen personally distribute white rosettes to each person at the feast? That week in Paris bread was becoming increasingly scarce, with many bakeries completely out of supplies. By Sunday 4 October bread riots even led to one baker being hanged, accused of hoarding flour in the expectation of higher prices. Increasingly bitter charges were made against the queen. It was widely rumoured that she was planning the counter-revolution and had given instructions for the stockpiling of flour at Versailles, hoping to crush the people with famine. The queen became a lightning conductor for much of the fury and frustration in Paris.
Monday, 5 October. Church bells rang out around the Place de Grève by the Seine in Paris, traditionally the place used for executions and hangings. Women began to gather: the poissardes – or fishwives – and market women, servants and washerwomen converged on the square united by their desperate poverty and equally desperate need for bread, their anger and resolve strengthened by the sight of their own hungry children. Despite the rain, by early afternoon more than six thousand women had assembled, armed with anything they could find: pitchforks, scythes, kitchen knives, even skewers and sticks. Nothing could deter them; they had nothing to lose as they began to march the twelve miles to Versailles, with the now driving rain soaking their ill-clad bodies. Soon after they left, the National Guard of Paris, eager to support the women’s march, also began to assemble. By the late afternoon fifteen thousand National Guards set out for Versailles, reluctantly led by Lafayette.
Marie-Thérèse, the queen’s daughter, still only ten years old, later wrote vividly of ‘that too memorable day’, which for her marked the beginning of the ‘outrages and cruelties’ that her family was to endure. That morning everything was tranquil at the palace; she was having her lessons, her Aunt Elisabeth had ridden out to her property at Montreuil, her father was hunting, her mother was in her gardens at Trianon. Madame Elisabeth was the first to hear that Paris was on the march and rushed to Versailles, in great agitation, to warn the queen. Her father raced back at three in the afternoon. The wrought-iron gates of the chateau were swung tightly shut against the people.
