Marie Antoinette

by Hilaire Belloc

If she had hoped, by an economy that seemed to her so important, to affect the Parlement, Marie Antoinette was in grievous error: in error from that lack of perspective and of grip which her position, and above all her character, had left in her. Within a week of it all the Parlement had replied by a renewed refusal to register, a renewed demand for the States-General, and was away at Troyes, exiled but sitting in full power, deliberating and enthusiastically supported by Paris old and new. At Versailles, Loménie de Brienne, the Queen’s man, demanded the title, beyond the practical power, of Chief Minister: such a demand led to the resignation of what little brains were left in the Council. In September he compromised with the Parlement, and let it return.

Loménie next formulated decrees which proposed indeed to rely on ordinary taxation—but to an extraordinary extent and on a novel scheme—and to call the States-General within five years: he intended (as did the Queen) to adjourn and surely to drop the meeting of the States-General altogether. In November, when a majority in the Parlement was secured by the absence of some, perhaps the purchase of others, he caused the King to meet that body—and then raised its anger again by registering without counting votes and, as it were, by the autocratic power of the King. If, as is possible, the Queen did not advise or countenance this last act, at any rate the whole tone of her correspondence applauds the decision.

The consequences following on this error were immediate. Orleans, now the Queen’s chief enemy, made himself a spokesman of discontent and was exiled to the provinces; he attributed his disgrace to the Queen. Sabattier and Tieteau de St. Just were arrested on the bench itself. The States-General, precisely because it had been proposed to consider them “in five years,” and because the Parlement had insisted on an earlier date, were more in the public mouth than ever; and as the year closed, Brienne, and all Brienne stood for, bethought them of some wide action that should remove all this friction and leave government secure.

That action had the Queen for its authoress. It was an attempt at despotic reform without representation, an Austrian model, and it was named “The New Order.”

No year in Marie Antoinette’s life had more affected her experience, her character, and her position in the State than this of 1787, her thirty-second year, which now drew to an end. She had made a Ministry; she had influenced, supported, in part created a policy; she had reaped the full harvest of pain in the first death of a child, in the growing illness of her eldest son, in the flood of calumny which had succeeded the La Motte’s escape from prison. She had come rapidly to actual power, she was exercising it with facility—and every act of hers led more nearly and more directly to the cataclysm before her.

The public hatred of her had immensely grown—in intensity, in volume, but especially in quality, since she had manifestly become the chief adviser of her husband and the creator of a scheme of government. The Polignacs, as I have said, had joined the enemy. Orleans was now definitely the head of her bitter opponents. The drawing-rooms of Paris had joined the populace against her. It had been actually proposed to mock her effigy during the rejoicing at the return of the Parlement from exile. The wits had renewed their nicknames: she was “Madame Deficit” as well as “the Austrian” she had always been—and by the winter all the quarrel in which the Parlement, the crowd, and nearly every permanent force was now ranged against the Crown, saw in her the core of the resistance and the personal object of attack.

The year 1788 at its very opening showed clearly how far the development had gone. That system of “a new order”—a powerful, uncriticised Crown, thorough reform, the negation of ideals—saw, risen up against such feminine and practical conceptions, those much stronger things—dogmas. The civic religion of the French and the creed of the era they were framing emerged. Before Easter the Parlement had denied the right of the executive to imprison at will, as also the right of the Prince to assimilate his edict to a public law, and had demanded the complete freedom of the three lawyers who had been arrested. But—an ominous thing—the Parlement claimed no privileges. It demanded the release of its members as citizens—and of human right against the arbitrary power of the Crown.

Against such a force as this—a creed—the only weapon that “The New Order” and the Queen could imagine was a reform of machinery. In this, as in so much else during the furious struggle of those eighteen months, “The New Order” fore-planned much that the Revolution itself was to achieve: it was modern, it was suited to circumstance, but lacking first principles it was apparent and direct, but lacking nationality and being opposed to the summoning of the States-General it was doomed. The scheme of “The New Order” included a replacing of all this antique, corporate, and privileged power of the Parlement by a High Court more fully reflecting the governing classes of the nation. It was not unwise, and Marie Antoinette—to judge again from her correspondence and from the universal opinion of contemporaries—was largely its originator and wholly its ally. It miserably failed.

The secret plan of it—surrounded with fantastic precautions—was divulged. The threatened Parlement (and it had the whole nation behind it) met at once, and D’Epresmenil explained the peril, and declared once more, but far more directly than before, for the principles upon which the Revolution was to turn, and especially the right of the States-General alone—regularly and periodically summoned—to grant supply. The arrests that followed—arrests which the Queen called with quite singular blindness “acts of rigour”—perilous as she saw, but necessary as she imagined—were the signal for an approach to civil war.

“The New Order” was resisted forcibly in the provinces by the privileged, by custom, by the populace (who feared new taxes), by local patriotism which feared the loss of local character and (what indeed so soon did come) the merging of all in one homogeneous State. All the troops were out; revolt had begun.