Marie Antoinette

by Hilaire Belloc

This new tradition owed nothing to the Queen. She was hardly aware of its presence. For her the choice of new Ministers was a personal and almost a domestic business in which she somehow had a right (and could find it entertaining) to play a part—she knew not what nor how. That part of hers turned out, as a fact, a small part and indecisive, utterly without plan; but such as it was it marks her necessity for action and change, and exhibits her place beside the King. In the intervals of choosing a new hairdresser and a new dressmaker, she paused now half-an-hour, now an hour, in the cabinet, hearing names which she hardly knew, and giving random advice which must have strained her audience to the very limits of toleration.

It was not mere Austrian action. Her brother the Emperor would often beg her not to meddle; the Austrian ambassador Mercy deplored her innocence of affairs and her inability to follow any one interest for one hour. Her mother wrote affectionately and worriedly, giving her the stale old advice of supporting Vienna—but fearing her capacity to do so. Meanwhile the Queen herself acted from the simple motive of being seen about, and added to this the equally simple motives of private tastes. Thus she would have restored Choiseul to some office. He came up a month after the accession, and she greeted him very kindly. He had helped to make her Queen, he was the traditional ally of Vienna, and though Vienna certainly did not want him now, Marie Antoinette went by the name and its associations alone: she judged as a child would judge. The King, who had no intention of accepting Choiseul, made a little awkward conversation with him, the opening of which turned pleasantly upon the old man’s baldness, and next day Choiseul went back home, “to see to the tedding of his hay.”

Again, the choice of Maurepas for chief Minister, four weeks before, was not—as has been represented—hers. The King chose his father’s old friend rather for permanent adviser and companion than as a first Minister—which title indeed he never received, and that Maurepas entered at all was the work not even of the King himself but of his aunt, Madame Adelaide. In the confusion of the first two days, when Sartines, Choiseul, Machault were all possible as Prime Ministers and all discussed, Madame Adelaide repeatedly suggested Maurepas’ name. To her and her sisters he was a tradition, part of a time which these old maids looked back to with regret as the last time of dignity, before mistresses had destroyed their father’s Court and half exiled them to their apartments.

Maurepas was seventy-three; he had left office between forty and fifty, and had done so from a quarrel with the Pompadour. This alone recommended him to Louis XV.’s daughter; that he should have been untouched by the vile interregnum of the Du Barry recommended him still more. Madame Adelaide had known him in power when, as a girl of seventeen, the eldest of the sisters, she was certain of life, in tune with her great position, and pleased with all she saw. Now after twenty-five years, which had been increasingly marred by a distant and bitter isolation from the Court, his name recurred to her as that of a fellow-sufferer and a memory of her youth. Madame Adelaide’s devoted service in her father’s last illness (she had caught the small-pox herself in attending him) gravely increased the weight of her advice. It was through her that Louis XVI. received the old man, and, once received, he remained. True, Marie Antoinette had carried the message to the King from his aunt, but she had done no more than this.

If it is asked why, with so little influence, the Queen’s perpetual interference was none the less permitted, and why this girl of eighteen, vivacious as she was ignorant, might ceaselessly bustle in and out of the council chamber, the answer is not that she was Queen—for no Queen had yet acted thus at Versailles, nor would any woman conscious of power have done so—but first that her whole self was now restless beyond bearing, and next that the King was ashamed to withstand her whom, afflicted as he was, he could hardly propose to command or regulate. With every fresh opening of the council door she made an enemy, with none a friend; but Louis all the while could only answer “Let her be.”

In one thing only during these months had she a clear object—and that was not a policy: she was determined to be rid of the Du Barry’s name. That woman was far away, exiled to Burgundy from the moment of the accession, to return afterwards to Louveciennes, but some of her clique remained, hated by all the populace and half the Court as much as by the Queen. With so much support Marie Antoinette succeeded. Three weeks after the death of Louis XV., D’Aiguillon was relieved of the department of Foreign Affairs: the grant of public money which he received on his resignation—it was but £20,000—would seem to us in modern England pitifully small, for we take it for granted that public officials should have a share in the public funds. But it is significant of the time and of the French temper that the grant was vigorously opposed and was obtained only on the personal demand of old Maurepas, who (by one of those coincidences so frequent in aristocracies) happened to be the uncle of this his chief political opponent.

Here was Marie Antoinette’s one success. The Austrian Court and Embassy had desired to keep D’Aiguillon—he could be played upon. Marie Antoinette had rejected their advice; she had gone, day after day, to the King, until he had consented to deprive D’Aiguillon of his post—and immediately her deficiency was apparent. To deprive D’Aiguillon was, in politics, not necessary, and, if accomplished, not final. To find some one for the Foreign Office who should at once be able and yet work contentedly under old Maurepas was of both immediate and of weighty importance. She refused to interest herself in the matter!

Luckily for France, Vergennes, then the representative of Louis at the Court of Stockholm, was chosen by the good judgment of the King, in spite of an impossible oriental wife.

Vergennes, approaching his sixtieth year, tenacious, silent, industrious, highly experienced, and microscopic, as it were, in the detail of diplomacy, was just such an one as the French needed to conserve the forces of their nation, to balance the smaller States against the rivals of Versailles, and to choose the very moment for the attack on England which, later, was to establish the United States. It is probable that, but for him, in the embarrassment of French finance and the consequent weakness of French arms, the nation would have fallen into some German conflict or have been abused before some German contention. As it was, the French owe in great part to Vergennes that peaceful accumulation of energy which permitted the Revolution to triumph.

In the nomination of this considerable diplomatic force the Queen had no part at all.