"I WILL ENJOY THE BENEFITS OF A PRIVATE LIFE, WHICH DOES NOT EXIST FOR US [ROYALS] IF WE DO NOT HAVE THE GOOD SENSE TO ASSURE IT"
-- Marie-Antoinette cited by Madame Campon
"I recall all the charm of the queen's illusion, of which she could grasp neither the impossibility nor the danger."
-- Madame Campan, her first chambermaid
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The fairy-tale farm where Marie-Antoinette would slip away with her clique
The memoir vividly describes the clans, gossip and intrigues of the late 18th-century court, and explains how the unaware young consort took the path that brought disaster.
A passage at the start of her memoir
"People sincerely attached to the queen have always regarded as one of her first misfortunes, perhaps even the greatest one [...] to have not met in the person naturally placed to be her counsel, someone who was indulgent, enlightened [...] who would have made the young [Austrian] princess understand that in France her dignity depended a great deal on custom [...] and especially that an imposing entourage would protect her against the mortal stings of calumny."
-- Memoir of Madame Campan, 1988 ed., pp. 46-47, slightly adapted
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The unaware young girl, who was not even 15 when she married to the future king, was used to the relatively free and simple Austrian court. Her resistance to the intricate etiquette of Versailles gave the faction that resisted that alliance a weapon...
Marie-Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria, age 12, 1767-1768 / zoom
A queen's sole obligation was to give children to France. Otherwise her role was only ceremonial. By becoming a fashion icon Marie-Antoinette highlighted Paris as a center of style, but defied the obligation to remain in the shadows:
Worse, since Louis XVI had no intimate best friend, she inadvertently took on the role of favori(te), the person closest to the king. Such figures were official, detested — and almost indispensable:
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Diane de Poitiers, c.1550; Leonora Galigai, c.1615; Marquis de Cinq-Mars, c.1640;
Marquise de Montespan, c.1670; Marquise de Pompadour, c.1640; Countess du Barry, c.1770
- Favoris shared kings' gifts of lands, posts, honors etc. with their clans, which gave them temporary access to power without the risk of rebellion.
- The institution evolved: Louis XIV's much stronger monarchy made revolt impossible and Louis XV's favorites of commoner origin (Jeanne Poisson ennobled as the Marquise de Pompadour and Jeanne Bécu ennobled as the Countess du Barry) had no traditional entourage to favor.
But clans were improvised around or against them, encouraging the intrigues and struggles for influence that made the exorbitant expense of life at a stifling court worthwhile.
Favoris were also lightning rods whose extravagance concentrated popular fury on themselves and away from the ruler, who was thought fatherly but misled.
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As well, favoring a few friends in a hierarchical court where
proximity to royals was a badge of identity and source of posts, gifts and honors brought powerful enemies.*
*Louis XV had already broken the rules when his favorite, the Marquise de Pompadour, organized and starred in plays to which only a few were invited. The innovation was cancelled on the pretext of cost, but really because of excluded courtiers' hostility.
-- La Reine et la favorite by Simone Bertière, 2000, pp. 347-354
The two women who succeeded each other as the queen's best friend were disinterested...
An ancestress of the royal family of Monaco
Madame Campan wrote of the Countess of Polignac, "I always thought her sincere attachment to the queen, as well as her taste for simplicity, let her avoid all that suggested a favorite's wealth. She had none of the faults that almost always accompany that title."
-- Madame Campan, p.100.
The Princesse de Lamballe returned from England to be near the queen as clouds darkened, and was massacred for it (please read on).
The favors they monopolized and the clique that surrounded them are at the root of the tragedy.
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Marie-Antoinette: l'inconscience guillotiné, documentary, 2022 / Internet |
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"Let them eat cake" is one of the "alternative facts" that were popularized from Palais-Royal but born at Versailles.*
*The pornographic La Vie de Marie-Antoinette can be read online.
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Marie-Antoinette by Sophie Coppola, 2006 / zoom |
They remain: "Barack Antoinette," a columnist called Obama to castigate a fête.
-- Maureen Dowd commenting his 60th birthday celebration in The New York Times
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Reasons deeper than personal frivolity help explain the queen's behavior:
- The society the unaware teen-ager encountered appears in an art that was light, decorative and often licentious, without deeper meaning.
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La Balançoire by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1767-1768 / zoom
An elderly gentleman (husband?) pushes the swing of a flirtatious young woman as an enraptured suitor admires her legs and cupids hug.
- Courtiers pretended to honor her, as when the fundamentally hostile brother of the king (the future Louis XVIII) gave a fête in which 50 cavaliers on superb white or black horses engaged in mock combat in her honor.
-- Madame Campan, p.110
- She did not need the trappings of etiquette to buttress her status: On hierarchical details of coiffures she said, "Arrangez tout cela comme vous l'entendrez : mais ne croyez pas qu'une reine, née archiduchesse d'Autriche, y apporte l'intérêt et l'attention qu'y donnait une princesse polonaise,* devenue reine de France."
-- Madame Campan, p.372
*Marie Leczinska, queen under Louis XV, had insisted on etiquette to buttress her inferior origins: her father was a dethroned king of Poland, a country under foreign powers' sway.
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Marie-Antoinette's obliviousness
is a major reason for the monarchy's end.
"Without her Parisiens would probably have kept their love for the King [after the flight to Varennes, below]. They liked the plump man who was not at all mean, and who in his portliness had an air that was kindly and paternal, very much to the liking of the crowd. [...] The market women called him bon papa; that was how the people saw him."
--Michelet, p.77 (slightly adapted)
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