The Lost King of France: The Tragic Story of Marie-Antoinette's Favourite Son
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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’
‘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.