Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty

by Imbert de Saint-Amand

While Marie Antoinette was thus turning towards Austria for assistance, the National Assembly at Paris repelled with energy all thought of any intervention whatsoever on the part of foreign powers. January 1, 1792, it issued a decree of impeachment against the King's brothers, the Prince de Conde, and Calonne. The confiscation of the property of the émigrés and the taxation of their revenues for the benefit of the State had been prescribed by another decree to which Louis XVI. had offered no opposition. January 14, Guadet said in the tribune, while speaking of the congress: "If it is true that by delays and discouragement they wish to bring us to accept this shameful mediation, ought the National Assembly to close its eyes to such a danger? Let us all swear to die here rather than—" He was not allowed to finish. The whole assembly rose to their feet, crying: "Yes, yes; we swear it!" And in a burst of enthusiasm, every Frenchman who would take part in a congress having for its object the modification of the Constitution, was declared an infamous traitor. January 17, it was decreed that the King should require the Emperor Leopold to explain himself definitely before March 1.

By a curious coincidence, this date of March 1 was precisely that on which the Emperor Leopold was to die of a dreadful malady. He was in perfect health on February 27, when he gave audience to the Turkish envoy; he was in his agony, February 28, and on March 1, he died. His usual physician asserted that he had been poisoned. The idea that a crime had been committed spread among the people. Vague rumors got about concerning a woman who had caused remark at the last masked ball at court. This unknown person, under shelter of her disguise, might have presented the sovereign with poisoned bonbons. The Jacobins, who might have desired to get rid of the armed chief of the empire, and the émigrés, who might have reproached him as too luke-warm in his opposition to the principles of the French Revolution, were alternately suspected. The last hypothesis was hardly probable, nor does anything prove that the Jacobins had any hand in the possibly natural death of the Emperor Leopold. But minds were so overexcited at the time that the parties mutually accused each other, on all occasions, of the most execrable crimes. For that matter, there were Jacobins who, out of mere bravado, would willingly have gloried in crimes of which they were not guilty, provided that these crimes had been committed against kings.

What is certain is, that Marie Antoinette believed in poison. "The death of the Emperor Leopold," says Madame Campan, "occurred on March 1, 1792. The Queen was out when the news arrived at the Tuileries. On her return, I gave her the letter announcing it. She cried out that the Emperor had been poisoned; that she had remarked and preserved a gazette in which, in an article on the session of the Jacobin Club at the time when Leopold had declared for the Coalition, it was said, in speaking of him, that a bit of piecrust could settle that affair. From that moment the Queen had regarded this phrase as an inadvertence of the propagandists."

On the very day when Marie Antoinette's brother died, Louis XVI.'s Minister of Foreign Affairs, De Lessart, had enraged the National Assembly by reading them extracts from his diplomatic correspondence, which they found not sufficiently firm. They were indignant at a despatch in which Prince de Kaunitz said: "The latest events give us hopes; it appears that the majority of the French nation, impressed with the evils they have prepared, are returning to more moderate principles, and incline to render to the throne the dignity and authority which are the essence of monarchical government." When De Lessart came down from the tribune, the whispering changed into cries of rage and threats against the minister and the court, which, it was said, was planning a counter-revolution at the Tuileries, and dictating to the cabinet of Vienna the language by which it hoped to intimidate France. At the evening session of the same day, Rouyer, a deputy, proposed to impeach the Minister of Foreign Affairs. "Is it possible," cried he, "that a perfidious minister should come here to make a parade of his work and lay the responsibility of it on a foreign power? Will the time never arrive when ministers shall cease to betray us? Were my head to be the price of the denunciation I am making, I would none the less go on with it." At the session of March 6, Guadet said: "It is time to know whether the ministers wish to make Louis XVI. King of the French, or the King of Coblentz."

On the 10th the storm broke. The day before, Narbonne had received his dismission. Brissot accused De Lessart of having compromised the safety of France, withheld from the Assembly the documents establishing the alliance between the Emperor and the King of Prussia, discredited the assignats, depreciated the credit, lowered the rate of exchange, and encouraged interior disorder. Vergniaud followed him, exclaiming: "From the tribune where I am speaking may be seen the palace where perverse counsellors lead astray and deceive the King given to you by the Constitution; where they forge chains for the nation, and arrange the manoeuvres which are to deliver us up to Austria, after having caused us to pass through the horrors of civil war. Terror and dismay have often issued from that famous palace. Let them re-enter it to-day in the name of the law, let them penetrate all hearts, and teach all who dwell there, that our Constitution accords inviolability to the King alone. Let them know that the law will overtake all the guilty without exception, and that there will not be a single head convicted of crime which can escape its sword." The decree of impeachment against the ministers was voted by a very large majority. De Lessart was advised to take flight, but he refused. "I owe it to my country," said he, "I owe it to my King and to myself to make my innocence and the regularity of my conduct plain before the tribunal of the high court, and I have decided to give myself up at Orleans." He was conducted by gendarmes to that city, where he was imprisoned. Louis XVI. dared not do anything to save his favorite minister. On March 11, Pétion, the mayor of Paris, came to the bar of the Assembly, and read, in the name of the Commune, an address in which it was said: "When the atmosphere surrounding us is heavy with noisome vapors, Nature can relieve herself only by a thunder-storm. So, too, society can purge itself from the abuses which disturb it only by a formidable explosion.... It is true, then, that responsibility is not an idle word; that all men, whatever may be their stations, are equal before the law; that the sword of justice is poised over all heads without distinction." Was not this language like a prognostic of the 21st of January and the 16th of October? Encompassed by a thousand snares, hated by each of the extreme parties, by the émigrés as well as by the Jacobins, Marie Antoinette no longer beheld anything but aspects of sorrow. Abroad, as in France, her gaze fell on dismal spectacles only. Her imagination was affected. She hardly dared taste the dishes served at her table. All had conspired to betray her. She had experienced so many deceptions and so much anguish; fate had pursued her with so much bitterness, that her heart, exhausted with emotions, and overwhelmed with sadness, was weary of all things, even of hope.

IV.

THE DEATH OF GUSTAVUS III.

The drama of the Revolution is not French alone; it is European. It has its afterclap in every empire, in every kingdom, even to the most distant lands. It excites minds in Stockholm almost as much as in Paris. Among the Swedes there are people whose greatest desire would be to parody the October Days, and to carry about on pikes the bleeding heads of their adversaries. The new ideas take fire and spread like a train of gunpowder. It is the fashion to go to extremes; a nameless frenzy and fatality seem let loose upon this epoch of agitations and catastrophes. All those who, at one time or another, have been guests at the palace of Versailles, are condemned, as by a mysterious sentence, either to exile or to death.