Marie Antoinette

by Hilaire Belloc

He was a prince of the Empire: Vienna had a right to speak—and almost did.

Austria and France had for now two years been at a strain: it was just two years since Joseph had written his first serious letter upon the Scheldt to his sister: the government of Austria was embittered, and had for sovereign a man who would not refuse to trade upon the embarrassment of Versailles. The last negotiations for indemnity against the opening of the Scheldt were still pending. The moment was opportune.

The Cardinal could be judged by but one tribunal of the King’s, and that a quasi-governmental body which had for a generation stood in increasing opposition to the Crown—the Parlement. For them also the moment was opportune.

He could be tried in but one town, and that town the capital, which had now taken up such a definite position of hatred against the Queen; in but one part of that town, in the Palais, right in the heart of Paris upon which all the crowds of that unity so easily converge, and whose towers were a perpetual symbol of the Monarchy which had deserted its ancient seat for the isolated splendour of Versailles.

But of much more weight than even these considerable and separate bases of resistance was that indefinitely large body of smaller and more fluctuating dangers whose integration the Queen should have seized if she was to save herself from destruction.

There are in politics, as in physics, conditions of unstable equilibrium in which a mass of fragments, seemingly in repose, may at a shock be exploded. Their energy lies ready to be released by the least disturbance. It is the business of statesmanship to remove or to dissolve such as these before large things are undertaken, lest a violent motion explode them. A thousand such lay about the palace of Versailles, threatening the Queen. Whatever particular grudges (even in friends) had had time to grow, the memories of hatred in enemies, the last of the Du Barry’s faction, the last of D’Aiguillon’s. The suspicions of the devout against her frivolity, the contempt of the philosophical for her religion, the irritation of the politician against her presence at the Council, the necessary enmity of Calonne—all the imperfect and capricious pleasures she had failed to pursue, all the losses, dismissals, and humiliations rightly or wrongly laid to her charge, were there, not consciously prepared, but fatally bound to spring to life if once a body of action against her took visible form. That form the trial of the Cardinal was to present. When such a body of opposition was in motion all would attach themselves to it, each from an aspect of its own. All the old dangers, as each appeared, made alliance with the new and immediate perils.

Madame de La Motte was arrested three days after the Cardinal, in the early hours of the 18th of August, just back at dawn in pomp from a great provincial party in Champagne. Her husband fled to London, there to meet a sympathy readily extended to such exiles, and to keep in touch with those centres of enmity against the French Crown and religion with which he was familiar. It was on the very day when Paris was in the first busy rumour upon the whole matter—when it was learnt that the Cardinal had been allowed to burn half his papers, that La Motte had got away, that suspicion was permitted to attach to the Queen—it was upon such a day, the 19th of August—that the Queen chose to re-open the theatre at Trianon and to re-open it with a play of Beaumarchais’.

Many tragedies in history contain some such coincidences, but none so many or so exact as those which accompany and determine the tragedy of Marie Antoinette.

Consider the position: the legend of her extravagance has re-arisen—unjustly. Trianon is—unjustly—the chief popular symbol of that extravagance. The theatre of Trianon, the most in view, the most obvious of its expenses, she had wisely suppressed during many months. The park at St. Cloud, at the gates of Paris, is a further count in the indictment against her. Her visit to Paris for her churching in May has proved her grievously unpopular: the hated financial agreement with Austria in regard to the Scheldt is developing, as it is believed (and rightly believed), under her guidance. Upon all this comes the thunder-clap of Rohan’s arrest—and just as men are beginning to comprehend and to explain it, just as the public and foreign enmity necessarily suggest her complicity, say that “there is more than meets the eye,” that “you will see, the Queen will make victims of them all; but she is responsible for the purchase of the gems!” just as the obvious lies were establishing themselves through the embryonic press of those days and the café gossip—in that very Assumption week she chooses to appear upon her stage at Trianon, dressed and painted for a part written by whom? By the man Caron—Beaumarchais by purchase—whom all the vulgar now associated with the most successful attack upon the existing régime, whom the older and the higher world remembered as the associate and perhaps the partner of the Jewish clique in London that had published the first dirty lie against Marie Antoinette’s chastity when she was as yet but a child of eighteen.

Why was such a folly committed? The answer to that question is all around the reader to-day. That society did not know its doom. It was “chic,” it was “the thing” for the ruling powers to read and to see acted criticism upon themselves. The little spice of danger—they could think it no more—was a piquant addition to jaded and well-known pastimes. But the Queen! How terribly more great and more real the living consequences were to be to her than to any such abstraction as “a régime”: she was to see and to feel continued physical violence, to be menaced with muskets, to be forced from her husband before his death, to have her child dragged from her; she was to be wholly abandoned, tortured silently by a subterranean silence, and at last publicly killed.