Marie Antoinette

by Hilaire Belloc

In Padua, where the Polignacs had taken refuge with their loot, the Emperor Leopold, returning from Tuscany, was at that moment their host and guest. With them and their circle he discussed the enormities of the French and the approaching escape of his sister and the King; for he was cognisant of their plan: he knew that since the death of Mirabeau the idea of relying upon French arms against the Parliament had been abandoned, and that an invasion by foreign allies was the scheme of the Court.

Leopold certainly designed, when the first part of that scheme was accomplished and the King was in safety on the frontier, to strengthen the royal armies with his own and to advance upon the Revolution. Varennes, I repeat, was everything. The King once free of Paris, and the armies would have been over the frontier. The King a captive in Paris, and compelled to pose as the acting and national Executive, war was another matter. The French nation could act as one force.

So insecure and dilatory were the communications of the time that for a whole fortnight nothing but guesses reached Padua. Upon the 2nd of July these guesses urged Leopold to write; but at last upon the 5th, a fortnight after the flight, came definite and official news. The King had succeeded. He was safe in Metz with the army of Bouillé. The Queen was safe beyond the frontier in Luxemburg.

Leopold sat down and wrote at once a sort of pæan, a cry of triumph and of immediate action, and offered his treasury, his army, his everything to his sister for the immediate march against the French people.

She, in Paris, watched and guarded every way, had found it possible to write to Fersen two notes which, when he destroyed these many monuments of her love for him, he copied with his own hand. Her main preoccupation is that he should not return by stealth. She tells him he is discovered, and that his part in the flight is known; she begs him to keep safe. But it is probable or certain from one phrase in these notes that in the bitter anger of the moment she desired to be rescued by a chivalry under arms, and would appeal to war.

That determination in turn she abandoned, and from the month of August onwards, until nine months later the armed struggle began, one plan, lucid, and especially lucid when one considers that it proceeded from so imperfect a judgment as hers, possessed her and was continually expressed: she demanded an International Congress backed by arms, the immediate threat of a vast but silent force, and no word of hostilities. Nevertheless and largely, as we shall see, through her war came. It came with the spring, and these few months after Varennes are but the lull before the noise of the first guns.

I would here admit into the text of this book one of those discussions which, in History of a living sort, should but rarely be admitted, and belong rather to an appendix. I admit it because a conclusion upon it is vital to any comprehension of the Queen and of the European position which ended in the struggle between France and Europe.

No historical quarrel has been more warmly debated than this. Did the old society, notably the Germanies, and at last all the privileged of Europe, down to the very merchants of the city of London, attack the Revolution to destroy it? Or did the Revolution break out in a flame against them, and compel them to the action they took and to the generation of war which ended in Waterloo?

In the current negation of morals the question has been thought by many to lack reality. Yet such is the nature of man that if he cannot give a human answer upon the matter of right and wrong, and a decision upon motive, all his action turns to dust, and he can neither approve nor disapprove any human act. Now when man can neither approve nor disapprove, things cease to be, so far as his intelligence is concerned; and without morals even his senses are dead. Therefore is it, and has it always been, of supreme importance to every great conflict of History that the one side or other should justify itself in motive. And therefore has this discussion raged around the origins of the Great War.

There is one sense in which the debate can never be resolved. It can be argued for ever as a metaphysical proposition, just as a man may argue whether a spherical surface is concave or convex, and fall at last into mere legomachy, so it may be eternally debated as to which of the two combatants was legitimately defending his existence. It is evident that both were in this position.