Marie Antoinette

by Hilaire Belloc

What, during that period, was the particular disposition of the Queen?

She was very active. She had determined upon a lucid plan, and of all the brains that were thinking out how and when, if ever, the struggle should come, hers was perhaps the most tenacious of its purpose.

We have a dozen letters of hers between the return from Varennes and the end of the year. One of great length, written to her brother in September, is accompanied by a memorandum and exactly details her plan. With the exception of two which were written, as a blind, for publication, and which in a private note she ridicules and disowns, every word she writes is consistent with her thesis. She proposes again that the International Congress should be called. In her later letters she begs that it may be called near the frontier, as, for instance, at Cologne. Before it is summoned, and during its session, there must be gathered an overwhelming military force ready to invade at once. But not a syllable must be breathed that could be taken as menace. In this plan Marie Antoinette was considering the personal safety of her husband and her child; and the whole theory of the action she advised pivoted upon a certain conception of the French people which was now so fixed in her mind that nothing could dissolve it; her theory was the French were not a military people; that they spent energy in words, and that before a plain evidence of force they would always give way; she carried that theory of hers, little as it later accorded with the brute facts of actual war, unmodified to the scaffold.

I have repeatedly insisted in this book upon the inability of Marie Antoinette to perceive the French mind. As a young woman her misconception of her husband’s people dealt with no more than personalities, ladies’ maids, duchesses, and the rest. When Gaul moved, and when she began her attempt at power in 1787, along through the communal millioned action of the Revolution, this misconception became a strong creed, a vision, as it were. She saw the French people intensely active, cruel, cowardly, and unstable: much in them of the cat and the fox, nothing of the eagle. She perceived their great mobs and their sudden united actions—but these phenomena were to her sporadic; she saw them—she did not reason upon them nor argue from them some peculiar regimental talent in the populace; and if you had told her that these appearances of marching thousands were due to a power of organisation from below—a national aptitude for the machinery necessary to arms and to diplomacy—the words would have seemed to her simply meaningless. She could not so much as conceive humanity to be capable of organisation save by the direct action of a few placed above it.

Of military qualities she understood nothing. She confused order, silence, and similarity of buttons with discipline. She had no conception of ferocity as the raw material of valour. Safe out of Paris she would without a moment’s hesitation have ordered the invasion, and she would have expected its successful issue in less than six weeks. Even in Paris she would have bargained to conquer with a “whiff of grape-shot” or some such rubbish; but in Paris, without one regiment to hand and without regular artillery, she felt that the very bodies of her family were in peril from “monsters and from tigers”—the words are her own: hence only did she hesitate and demand an armed congress rather than an invasion. To that armed congress and its menace she had no doubt at all that the French would yield.

A metaphor will explain the situation clearly. A human being, caught by some fierce animal but not yet mauled, appeals in a whisper to a comrade near by to load, and, if possible, by some demonstration of human force and of intelligent will to make the wild beast loose its hold; he begs that comrade to do nothing merely provocative lest the animal should rend him upon whom it has pounced: but, of course, that comrade is to fire at the first active gesture of attack the brute may deliver. Of the ultimate victory of his armed comrade the man in peril feels there can be no doubt at all; he only advises a particular caution on account of his own situation and impotence.

Moreover, she was convinced, and says it in so many words, that the French would give way at once before the presence of a great and silent but determined force upon their frontier.

So clear is the plan in her mind that she is bitterly impatient of the necessary caution and delay of diplomacy, and of the long process of negotiation whereby Berlin is brought into the agreement, the tergiversations of Madrid are discounted and the exact balance between desire for war and power to wage it are sounded. Here and there the peevishness of her early womanhood appears in the complaints she makes, almost as though she had been abandoned by her brother and his armies.

At last, in February 1792, this long correspondence is ended. The French nation has, upon the whole, accepted, its young rhetoricians have enthusiastically acclaimed, the approach of war. She, true to her plan, proposes that her brother shall meet this growing enthusiasm by positive demands, definitely formulated, dealing with the internal affairs of the French people, proceeding from Vienna and demanding instant reply. We now know that she herself drafted these demands, and on the 16th of February Mercy writes to tell her that the Emperor will order the French Parliament to maintain the French Monarchy in its full rights and liberty, to withdraw the French armies from the frontier, to respect the imperial rights of the Alsatian feudatories; and that he will at once back up this ultimatum with an additional force, beyond that already gathering, of 40,000 men. She acknowledges the plan and confirms it. A fortnight later, upon the 1st of March, Mercy can give her the last great news: Prussia has formally consented to move, though demanding, of course, from the French Monarchy after its victory compensation for the cost of the campaign—which will surely be willingly accorded.

It was on the 1st of March, I say, that this final news was written, when, as so continually chances throughout Marie Antoinette’s life, a special fate appears and intervenes.