Marie Antoinette

by Hilaire Belloc

THE few doubts that some have put forward against the authenticity of this famous document will, unless history abandons its modern vices, increase with time, for it is a document exactly suited to the type of minute, internal, literal, and documentary criticism by which tradition is, to-day, commonly assailed. It will be pointed out that the psychology of this letter differs altogether from that of the mass of Marie Antoinette’s little scribbled notes, and equally from her serious political drafts and despatches. Critics will very probably be found to dispute the possibility of such a woman at such a time producing such a document. The style fits ill with what she was in Court just before it purports to have been written, and also with what she was on her way to the scaffold just after. Most important of all, perhaps, the sentences are composed in a manner quite different from that of any other letter of hers we possess; they have a rhythm and a composition in them: the very opening words are in a manner wholly more exalted and more rhetorical than ever was her own.

It will be further and especially pointed out that the moment when it was discovered was the very moment for forgery, and this point is of such importance to the discussion that I must elaborate it.

By nightfall of June 18, 1815, the experiment of founding democracy in Europe was imagined to be at an end: Napoleon was definitely defeated. On the 7th of July the first forces of the Allies entered Paris, and on the 20th of November was signed the second Treaty of Paris, whereby the reinstatement of the old régime in France was accomplished at a price to the nation of 700,000,000 francs and of all its conquests. All the power of a highly centralised Government was now in the hands of Louis XVIII., and it was in the highest degree profitable to prove oneself a friend to what had but a few months before seemed a lost cause. Document after document appeared professing a special knowledge of the woes of the Royal Family, petition after petition was presented in which the petitioners (nearly always in the same conventional and hagiographical style) spoke of the Royal “martyrs” in the Temple and in the Conciergerie.

In the light of such a character attaching to this particular moment, note the following sequence of dates in connection with the production of the document we are discussing.

Not two months after the signing of the Treaty of Paris the French Chamber voted the Law of Amnesty. The seventh clause of this Act banished the regicides who had sat in the Convention. Among these was a certain Courtois, a man now over seventy years of age, who had bought a large country house and estate near the frontier. Note, further, that Courtois had started as a small bootmaker and was one of the very few politicians of the Revolution who had followed our modern practice of making money out of politics. His honesty, therefore, was doubtful: a thing which we cannot say of the enthusiasts of the time. Of those we can say that their imaginations or their passions may warp their evidence, but in the case of Courtois we know that he was a professional politician of the modern type, and would do a dishonest thing for money.

Now this Courtois had been one of a Commission named by the Convention to examine Robespierre’s papers after the fall of Robespierre on the 28th of July 1794. He was what the French call the Reporter of the Commission—that is, the director of it—and it was called the “Courtois Commission.” The Commission published their report of what they had found in Robespierre’s house. It was a report two volumes in length for which Courtois was responsible, and of which he was practically the author.

This minute and voluminous report made no mention of the Queen’s letter. Not a word is heard of it during all those twenty-two years until the aforesaid Bill of Amnesty is before the French Parliament of the Restoration and the regicides, including old Courtois, passing his last days on his comfortable estate, are to suffer exile. Then for the first time the Queen’s letter appears. On the 25th of January 1816 Courtois writes to a prominent lawyer, an acquaintance of his wife’s, a Royalist, and in touch with the Court, telling him that he had kept back ten pieces among the mass of things found in Robespierre’s house, three of them trinkets, a lock of hair, &c., one or two letters of no importance—and the capital point of all, this letter of Marie Antoinette’s to her sister-in-law. He offers to exchange these against a special amnesty to himself, or at least of a year’s delay before he is exiled, in order, presumably, to allow him to realise his fortune.

This is not all: the letter was not written until Courtois’ wife was dead; and it was written on the very day of her death and the moment after it—the moment, that is, after the death of the only person who would presumably know—if he allowed any one to know—whether he had or had not carefully concealed these documents for so many years.

The Government of Louis XVIII. offered money for the letter, and, having so lulled the suspicions of Courtois, sent one of its officials without warning into his house and seized his effects. Some days afterwards the letter (which no one had yet seen or heard of) is produced by Royal order and shown to Madame d’Angoulême (who is said to have fainted when she saw it), and ordered to be read from every pulpit during Mass on the 16th of October of every year; a vast edition of it is brought out in facsimile and distributed broadcast, and the letter itself is enshrined among the public exhibits at the Archives.

A lengthy analysis of the sort just concluded is necessary to make the reader understand how and why a strong attack upon the authenticity of the letter will sooner or later certainly be made. I owe it to my readers to say why the apparently strong presumption against this letter does not in my opinion hold.