Marie Antoinette

by Hilaire Belloc

This the Commons could see, under the light that fell from high windows near the roof; it fell over two thousand of the public—guests chosen rather than a true public; they filled the galleries above, they swarmed in the dark aisles beneath, undivided from the three orders—a familiarity shocking to our historians who, craning their necks, have watched as a privilege and with respect the fag-end of the House of Commons or the County Council from a pen.

To the command of Dreux Brézé all that great hall rose: the King rose also, read his short speech in a firm voice, and put on his hat to sit down. The Nobles covered themselves at the King’s gesture: among the Commons there was confusion—they did not know the etiquette, or rather some did, some did not. The incident was insignificant and comic: a graver thing followed it. Barentin rose, the Keeper of the Seals; he spoke for an hour. Had he spoken for three minutes and spoken but one sentence it would have been all he had to do, for he was there to tell them that it was left to the Three Orders to sit separately or together as they might choose. All the Revolution was latent in that command.

The Nobles would vote to sit separate; possibly the clergy: the “National Assembly”—as all thought of it, as all called it—would be turned into a “Lords and Commons”—an absurd, complicated and do-nothing machine with privileges and customs, quaintnesses and long accommodations between this house and that; it would lose touch with the general; the sap of national life would be cut off from it; it would not be able to create; it would be the jest of that which really governed. As in England to-day our various elected bodies are the jests of the plutocracy, so in 1789 the “National Assembly,” tripartite, played upon by vanity and ignorance, would have become the jest of the Crown. But in France an institution, once unreal, disappears, and before July the Assembly was, according to this plan, to disappear. It was deliberately conceived as a means of nullifying and destroying the Parliament.

Necker spoke next. He spoke for three hours, and was listened to throughout, for he dealt with finance. His speech was full of lies—but his name had not yet lost the titular place of idolatry. When he had ended his Genevese falsehoods, the ceremony was over and all were free to dine. But with Barentin’s words the Revolution had begun.

All May Gaul worked and seethed. The instinct of numbers aimed straight for the objective upon which all turned, and the Commons demanded the accession to one corporate Assembly of the Nobles and Clergy. They negotiated with the privileged houses; they affirmed the principle of combined voting: Necker sent for soldiers. By the end of the month the last attempt at some voluntary arrangement had failed. Meanwhile the King, by some lethargy or through the intrigue of some cabal, had not yet formally received a deputation of the Commons.

What did the Queen make of that May? The days seemed to her first an ugly rumour throughout Versailles, buzzing round the palace—soon an uproar. She stood with the few that actively maintained privilege against the Commons; but, a trifle wiser than they, she conveyed their counsels in a moderated form to the King. It was not enough: the troops still came into Paris—Gaul still rose higher and higher; and through the tumult something much more to her, more intimate, infinitely more acute and true, ran and held her as a physical pain will pin the mind and hold it during the playing of some loud and meaningless music: it was the dying of her little son—he lay at Meudon dying.

The end of the French Monarchy was mirrored in the fate of the last bodily forms that were to contain its Idea. The Bourbon heirs, one after another, died before succession. Louis XV., a great-grandson, himself delicate from birth, was succeeded by a grandson again, a boy painfully saved by the doctors—a man throughout life partially infirm. The line had come at last to this child, the Dauphin, whose advent had been the opportunity for such strong joy throughout the country and in whom the New Age was to find its first King. All the phases of doom had shown themselves: first, the high promise, then the vague doubts, the mysteries of a general disease; lastly, the despairs. For a month, ever since the opening of the States-General, which he had languidly witnessed, it had been but a question of the day on which the boy would die. That day had come.

It was the 3rd of June at Meudon. The King and the Queen had come in answer to sudden and graver news of their child; they reached the place in the early afternoon—and they were implored to return. The boy was within, at his agony. The King sank into a chair and cried that his son was dead, and the poor lad’s mother, suddenly broken in the midst of so many and such great public alarms, of her government, her resistance and her perils, suddenly knelt down and cried wildly, rocking her head in her hands, burying her face on Louis’ knees: she called out to God. They were left thus together, and at one the next morning the Dauphin was dead.

It was as though two majesties or angels challenged each other in those days: the majesty which reigns inwardly and which everywhere makes of a son’s death the supreme agony of the world, though sons die hourly; the majesty which reigns outwardly and which commands, once in a thousand years, the passing of societies and kingdoms. For while this death was doing at Meudon, in the Commonwealth the last decisions also were at hand. Two days after the sad procession of ranks and delegates had done honour to the dead child, the Commons summoned for the last time the Clergy and the Lords to join them and form one body to mirror the nation. It was but three days after the little body had been taken to lie at St. Denis among the kings that the next step was taken. The Revolution broke with law—it now first began to be the Revolution and to do. The Commons declared themselves to be no longer the “Commons,” but—with all of the privileged orders who would join them—they declared themselves to be the “National Assembly”: those who would not join them were no part of the body which was to remake the world: their legality was not to avail them: the Commons had “made act of sovereignty,” and the strain between two centres of authority, the Crown and the Representatives, had begun.

It was this that the Queen must watch and parry and try to understand, now, when the first part of her flesh had gone down into the grave, and her brain, shaken with despairs, must attempt to control and to comprehend the wave; and her eyes, weary of weeping, to read orders, to note faces, and her voice, with which she could no longer call her son, to command. She was in the centre of the resistance for a month, and it failed.