Marie Antoinette

by Hilaire Belloc

FIRST PAGE OF LOUIS XVI’S WILL

Cléry, the dead master’s valet, was taken away, still noting as he went the new look in the Queen’s eyes. And in this same week there came the mourning clothes which they had asked of the authorities and which had been granted them. The Princess Royal fell ill. The Queen would no longer walk in the garden now, and the child, lacking exercise—and with bad blood—suffered. Her legs swelled badly. The authorities allowed the man who had been the family doctor of the children in the old days to come and visit them now. Brunier was his name, and in the old days Marie Antoinette had affected to ridicule his middle-class energy: she thought he lacked respect to the clay of which she and her children were made. She was glad enough to see him now, and he was devoted. He was allowed to call in a surgeon and to bring in linen. Nor was he their only communication with the external world, for though the sound and the news of it did not reach them, yet they were not as modern prisoners are, denied companionship. Upon the pretext or with the real excuse that the mourning clothes did not fit, a dressmaker whom they had known was allowed in; and in general, as will be seen in a moment, there were methods of communication between them and those who desired to know every moment of their captivity and every accident of their fate. From the close of January onwards into the summer, five months, it is possible to establish no precise chronology of their actions, but it is possible to decide the general tenour of their lives: save in one particular, which is that we cannot determine to-day what exactly were the relations between the Queen and those who would rescue her or who could give her news of the outer world—especially Fersen.

We have of course several accounts furnished by eye-witnesses, notably the account of Turgy, who was their sole servant in their prison; but these accounts, and that account especially, are tinged with the very obvious atmosphere of the Restoration. Quite poor people, writing on the suggestion of a powerful government at a time when every laudatory or illuminating detail upon the imprisonment of the Royal Family had its high money value, must, however honest, be somewhat suspect. For the most honest man or woman the conditions of the Restoration were such that there would be an inevitable tendency to exaggeration; and we have no evidence available of the exact characters of the witnesses. Still the witnesses are witnesses, and though an elaborate code of signals (which some of them pretend) probably did not exist, yet we know both from Fersen himself and from the way in which affairs were conducted on either side, that not a little communication was established between the widowed Queen and the Royalists outside. To more than that general statement no historian can commit himself, unless he be one of those belated university types who will trust a printed or a written document beyond their own common sense.

It must be remembered that during the first two months after the death of the King, that is, during all February and March 1793, the exalted and the noble minds of the Gironde were still at the head of that executive power which is in France (since the French have no aristocracy) the whole of government. Nay, they remained technically the heads of the Executive until the end of May 1793, though their power was touched by the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal on the proposal of the Radicals in March, and undermined by the establishment of the Committee of Public Safety on the proposal of Danton in early April.

The Girondins and the Municipality of Paris were at odds. The Municipality itself was not homogeneous. The guarding of the Queen, which was the business of the Municipality, was not uniform. The Municipality had to choose many men to relieve each other in relays; and of these, two, Toulan and Lepitre, tended, at least after a little experience of their prisoners, to show them sympathy. One of their officers, Michonis, did more and would have saved her.

From time to time a newspaper would be smuggled in to these Princesses; it is said that music played from a window whence they could hear it, conveyed signals, and at any rate it is certain that Fersen had some news of them.

Now Fersen at this moment, in early February that is, bad as his judgment of French affairs was, appreciated their situation in a phrase. He called the Queen “a hostage,” and this describes very accurately the meaning of her captivity.

I repeat, no one can understand the Revolution who does not treat it as a military thing, and no one can understand military affairs who imagines them to be an anarchy. Of necessity a brain directs them, for if in military affairs a plan be lacking, the weakest opposing plan can always conquer. It was not cruelty nor love of vengeance that dominated the position of the prisoners. They were an asset.

But though their value was recognised and their imprisonment was part of a diplomatic arrangement, yet there were different policies regarding them. The Radicals, the Mountain, were at once the most enthusiastic and the most practical of the Revolutionary groups. They were not in power, they had not a permanent majority in the Parliament though they had Paris behind them, but they saw clearly that France was in to win: they saw clearly (first Danton, then in succession to him Carnot) that every general action lost, every fortress in a chain surrendered, was the approach not of some neutral or balancing arrangement, but of a full, complete and ruthless reaction in Europe without and in France within. It had come to winning all or losing all. The nobler Girondin blood that still controlled the Republic knew too little of the vices of men to follow that calculation. The Girondins still believed that in some mystic way a steady adherence to the Republican ideal—the volunteer soldier as against the conscript, the citizen controlling the soldier, the locality governing itself—man absolute—was a thing so high that no human circumstance could wound it. They thought it bound to survive through some force inherent in justice.