Marie Antoinette
(From a French print)
The trial that followed has been justly described as the prologue of the Revolution. To the calumnies it gave birth may be traced the hatred which engendered the Reign of Terror.
“Calumny,” says M. Chaix d’Est-Ange in his brilliant monograph on the Necklace Affair, “is common to all ages, but it has not always the same force and success. In times when public opinion is indifferent or feeble it is despised and powerless. At other periods more favourable to it, borne on the wings of passion it soars aloft strong, confident, and triumphant. If ever it was a power it was in the eighteenth century.”
“It was everywhere,” says de Goncourt, “under the roofs of courtiers and blackmailers alike, in the bureaux of the police themselves, and even at the side of the Queen.”
Given such a state of society Marie Antoinette could have done nothing so calculated to injure herself as to cause the arrest of the Cardinal. If he deserved the Bastille it was not necessary to send him there. Though she may be excused for regarding him as a “vulgar swindler who stole diamonds to pay his debts,” she should have remembered that he was also the head of one of the greatest houses in France. As soon as the news of his arrest was known there was but a single opinion in the salons of the nobility: “What, arrest the Grand Almoner of France in full pontificals before the whole Court for a bit of chiffon! Send a Rohan and the chief of the clergy to the Bastille! C’est trop!”
The malcontents of the Court recognized in this shameful disgrace the hand of the unpopular minister Breteuil, who was known to be the bitter enemy of the Cardinal.
“M. de Breteuil,” wrote Rivarol with truth, “has taken the Cardinal from the hands of Madame de Lamotte and crushed him on the forehead of the Queen, which will retain the marks.”
It was by his advice, indeed, that Louis XVI had been persuaded to gratify the rage of his reckless consort. The opportunity of ruining his enemy had been too great for Breteuil to resist. The weakness of the King, the unpopularity of the Queen and the faults of a blundering minister were thus alike accentuated.
“When a king has absolute power,” says Chaix d’Est-Ange, “it is without doubt at such a time as this that he should use it to stifle scandal.” The arrest of the Cardinal could only have been justified by his conviction. It was a question of his honour or the Queen’s. Thirty years before it would have been an easy matter to find him guilty, but the spirit of disrespect for a tyrannized and stupid authority which was beginning to assert itself everywhere made Rohan’s conviction extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible. For Louis XVI, from a mistaken sense of equity which was interpreted as weakness, allowed the Parliament to try him.