475. The French Revolution: Marie Antoinette (Part 1)
2024-07-28 00:52:53
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Frivolous, extravagant, libertine, orgiastic, lesbian, incestuous, and bloodthirsty. A poisoner and an infanticide. Marie Antoinette tried her hand at every crime. Through her wickednesses, she caused the revolution. She ruined the country, brought the people to despair, drove them to revolt.
All must be revealed. It was from your lechery that our coffers were emptied to pay for your pleasures, so declared the anonymous author of The Cause of the French Revolution or The Secret Conduct of Marie Antoinette of Austria, Queen of France, published in 1790.. After having brought about the fall of the Ancien Régime, she struggled to preserve it. She was corruption personified, infinitely decadent. So that was Chantal Thomas in La Reine Scellérate, The Wicked Queen, her biography, her account of Marie Antoinette through the eyes of the propaganda against her, Tom.
And what a way to kick off our great new series on the French Revolution, then with libertinism, orgiastic behavior.
Incest, bloodthirstiness, brilliant.
Everything we associate with French history, and the perfect way for us, Tom, on the rest of this history, to greet the beginning of the Paris Olympics.
Absolutely. So. yeah, the eyes of the world are on Paris and France, so how better for us to contribute a series on what is probably, Dominic, I mean, one of the great seismic events, not just in European, but in global history.
Certainly one of the two or three greatest stories in world history. I mean, the rollercoaster of bloodshed, violence, utopianism, insurrection, excitement, you name it. In fact, such a terrific story, Tom, that we're going to take at least two series, probably three series, to do it justice, aren't we? So this is the kickoff for our first series, which will take us through the first couple of years of the revolution.
Yeah. So we're going to look at some of the causes, some of the background to the revolution, and then we'll take through the storming of the Bastille, and go up to the point where the king, Louis XVI, and his queen, Marie Antoinette, who we've just been hearing about, trying to get out of France, and, spoiler alert, they fail. And that is the cliffhanger on which we will leave it. Because of course, everybody knows what will then happen to the king and queen. And I think Marie Antoinette is a kind of wonderful focus for looking at some of the causes.
I mean, she's one of the instantly kind of recognisable figures.
She must be one of the two or three most well-known people in all French history, I would have said.
Yes. And as that kind of bravura passage that you quoted from Chantal Thomas's wonderful book suggests, at the time, she is seen by enthusiasts for the revolution as the absolute embodiment of everything that prompted it. She is kind of the incarnation of ancien regime, arrogance, of aristocratic splendor, and of a kind of quality of vampirism that has leeched the French people of what should be rightfully theirs. So in her lifetime, before and then, particularly after the revolution, she is the object of absolutely kind of obsessive hatred. And it's also a kind of hatred, because it is tied up with kind of fantasies about what she's been getting up to.
And I guess that, I mean, that runs through to the present day, because the one phrase that everyone would associate with her, let them eat cake, is still repeated, isn't it? Despite the?
fact that she never said it. She never said it. I know. The original phrase is, qu'ils mangent de la brioche. So let them eat.
brioche has slightly different connotations,
doesn't it? Yeah, because I always kind of imagine them, you know, a big gato with kind of.
strawberries on the top or something. But she never said it anyway, so there's no point in dissecting it, I guess, to some degree, other than the fact that people think she said it is indicative of this idea of her and Louis, who's supposedly kind of a puppet, then living this life of unbelievable depravity and licentiousness and arrogance and not caring, all of which, well, not all of which is completely wrong, but there are definitely.
huge problems with that. Nuances. Yeah. Against that, against the image of Marie Antoinette as a kind of depraved vampire. There's also been right from the beginning for conservatives, a sense that she is the archetype of the victims of the revolution.
Her fate exemplifies what critics of the revolution see as its destructiveness, as its kind of bloodlust. So the revolution itself is cast as a vampire. And in England, the person who classically first articulates that is the Irish politician and Whig, so not even a Tory, Edmund Burke, who November 1790, wrote reflections on the revolution in France. And in that, he famously recalls seeing Marie Antoinette, kind of 16 or 17 years before, at the court, glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy. And he famously infuses, I thought 10,000 swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.
But the age of chivalry is gone, that of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded and the glory of Europe is extinguished.
forever. Edmund Burke's, I would say among biographers and among people who studied the revolution, it's his take, actually, that is more enduring than the let them eat cake, she's a vampire school of thought, isn't it? Because actually, now, I would say, most writers are filled with horror when they look at what happened to Marie Antoinette, this young girl who arrived in France and was turned into a hate figure for the mob. Chantal Thomas, who we opened with,
her book is about the vituperation that is kind of lashed on Marie Antoinette. And she has a section where she talks about how biographers through the 19th and into the 20th century would debate about whether these were true or not. And she just says, you know, none of these stories about the incest and the vampirism are true. I mean, they're obviously not true. And she says that most recent biographies have been written to quote her with sympathy, if not with love.
And I would say that's probably true of her as well, because she wrote a novel that then got turned into a film called Farewell, My Queen in English. that featured Diane Kruger, so Helen of Troy in Troy, as Marie Antoinette. And that's a French film. But of course, Marie Antoinette has also been a kind of an American pinup. So a film that was massively popular with my daughters when they were growing up came out in 2006 is Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, in which she's kind of cast, as, you know, very much, a contemporary heroine.
She's surrounded by her squad. She's got converse trainers in the cabinet. You know, she rushes around Versailles to new wave bands. And what was interesting about that, I was kind of reading up about the reception of it in France, because it was premiered at Cannes. And there it was greeted with boos and then with cheers, so kind of answering boos and cheers by the French journalists who've been watching it, which I guess kind of sums up a massive division in France itself about her.
Because Marie Antoinette stands for the revolution to some degree, because what you think of Marie Antoinette, you know, you ask an educated Frenchman or Frenchman what they think of Marie Antoinette, and their answer will tell you, well, they think of the revolution, probably, and probably also where they stand politically, even today, in the 21st century, don't you think?
I mean, I do. And I think to a degree, that may be true as well in the broader world, perhaps. But I mean, it's much more focused in France, obviously. And I think that that sense of ambivalence, you know, is Marie Antoinette a monster? Or is she a victim?
Is she someone to be detested and loathed? Or is she someone to be pitied and admired? That's an ambivalence that is there even before the revolution. So the way that she is viewed by the French public is a kind of mixture of loathing and desire. Because she's not always hated.
That's an important point to make. You know, she's very popular with certain segments of society. And I think that she's cast either as a kind of emblem of royal grace. Because, as we will see, in a way, she's a very, very modern figure. Yeah, completely.
She kind of, basically, I think, invents the French ideal of fashion. She's way ahead of the game. But to other people, this makes her the kind of the embodiment of frivolity or decadence. And she's a very proactive queen. Queens in France generally are not expected to play a proactive role in court life, still less national life.
Marie Antoinette comes to do that. And she's a kind of emblem of all the paradoxes that we'll be talking about in the context of the revolution. And the fact that she's a figure of fantasy is really crucial. Because not just her, but the revolution itself is about the creation of stories, the projection of stories and narratives onto facts of, you know, the economy, agriculture, the crowds, the court, everything. It's how you structure the story that basically determines.
your attitudes to the revolution, I think. Totally agree, Tom. I mean, historians like Simon Schama and Robert Darnton have written brilliant books about how the French revolution is a sort of hall of mirrors or a hall of narratives, I suppose. Very appropriate for Versailles, isn't it? Yeah.
So let's start not at Versailles, but with Marie Antoinette herself. So she is born, Tom, in 1755.. And of course, the single most important thing about her, I would say, is that she is not French. She is Austrian. She is.
We love the Habsburgs on. The Rest is History. I don't think there'll ever be a historical podcast in the history of mankind that is so keen on the Habsburgs as The Rest is History. We've had Edward Habsburg talking about the Habsburgs. We've had Franz Ferdinand, a great friend of.
The Rest is History. And now another.
Marie Antoinette. Yes. Although she's born Maria Antonia. And I think that it's fair to say that her identity as an Austrian and as a Habsburg is kind of fundamental both to how her admirers see her and how her detractors see her. So, to her admirers, she is an embodiment of a new age of peace between what traditionally have been the great rivals in European politics.
So, going right way back to the 16th century, Charles V and François I, these are the people who are kind of tearing Europe up while Luther is busy getting on with his stuff. And France and the Habsburg Empire have been the great geopolitical rivals on the continent of Europe. But this has changed over the course of the 18th century due to the emergence of two new great powers. One of those is Britain, very happy to say. So, in the Seven Years' War, Britain is taking on France and winning as a kind of global power.
But on the continent, there's the emergence of Prussia. And Prussia is hungry for a lot of Austria's traditional territories. And under its great king, Frederick II, it annexes a province called Silesia, doesn't it? Which is basically now, it's a chunk of Poland. And the Habsburgs are terribly upset about this.
And basically, they kind of enter into an alliance with France so that they can get Silesia back. And France enters into an alliance with Austria so that she can have a counterweight to Britain.
So the diplomatic revolution. historians call this, because it's such a seismic moment in European history.
Yeah. So the Seven Years' War breaks out in 1756 with Britain and Prussia against Austria and France. And the following year, a very heavyweight figure in French politics, the Duc de Choiseul, arrives in Vienna as the French ambassador. And the rulers who greet him, they're a couple, aren't they? So the emperor is Francis I.
But the person who's really kind of cracking the whip is his wife, the empress, Maria Theresa. And she is a very, very proficient politician. Indeed, one might say stateswoman. But she's also very, very fertile. And the Habsburgs have always, I mean, it's been their boast, isn't it?
That some empires get their way by fighting, we do it by marrying off our children. And Maria Antonia is their 11th daughter. And, as it will turn out, their last daughter. And the reason that the Duc de Choiseul is interested in her is that she is one year younger than the grandson of Louis XV, the French king, also inevitably called Louis. And his very fertile mind is thinking, well, you know, we could maybe marry them off.
A brilliant way to cement the alliance and to ensure that the alliance endures.
Yes. And so in due course, Choiseul goes back from Vienna, he goes back to Paris and he becomes foreign minister, basically the kind of, almost the prime minister for Louis XV. And he's kind of pushing this idea. He's saying, we should really try and cement this alliance. And it comes into further focus.
in 1765, when Louis XV's son, and therefore the father of this Louis, who is being lined up to marry Maria Antonia, he dies. And so the grandson of Louis XV is now the Dauphin, the kind of French equivalent of the Prince of Wales, the heir to the throne.
And he's 11, and Maria Antonia is then 10..
Yes. And on the 4th of April, 1770, it's all agreed. The marriage contract is signed. There's a kind of weird thing where they do a proxy marriage in Vienna. So the new emperor, Maria Theresa's son, Joseph, he stands in for the Dauphin.
And then, two days later, Maria Antonia is put into a carriage along with 56 other carriages, and they set off from Vienna to go to. And people who are enthusiasts for this alliance think this is brilliant. Absolutely wonderful.
But of course, in France, there are lots of people who are not enthusiasts, because, as you said, I mean, these are ancestral enemies. They have, of course come together under the pressure of Prussia and Britain. But, culturally, imaginatively, the idea of Austria to most French men and women is this horrendous place, our enemies, the Austrians, can't be trusted. And that baggage, she is never able to shed it for the rest of her life.
So right the way through her career, and to an escalating degree, she is always referred to as le trichien, so the Austrian. But if you put the emphasis on chien, that's bitch in France. Yeah, of course. So it's the kind of the ostrich bitch. So she's always being portrayed either as an ostrich or as a dog or both.
And the weird thing is, is that this isn't actually remotely fair, because her father is basically French. So, Francis I, he's the Duke of Lorraine. He is of French royal descent. And there's a case for saying that Marie Antoinette is actually one of the most French queens that the Bourbon, the royal dynasty, have ever had. Because normally they're marrying foreign queens who have no French connections at all.
But what's interesting is that her father basically gets written out of the story and she is portrayed as being her mother's daughter, solely her mother's daughter. Marie Theresa, is seen as this terrifying Virago who is out to destroy France. And so Marie Antoinette is cast as a kind of Trojan horse who's been sent into the very stronghold of French power to destroy it from inside.
In Simon Sharma's words, the spy whore, he says, that's the, I mean, we're jumping ahead, but that's the image that people later have of her.
Yes. And Maria Antonia, she really does become Marie Antoinette. So actually, French has been her first language. She speaks it initially with a German accent, but then she very rapidly loses that. And in preparation for her life at the French court, she's had a French tutor called the Abbé de Vermont, who turns up and is appalled to discover that, Marie Antoinette, basically, she hasn't had any education at all.
And throughout her life, she has no interest in books. She's not remotely intellectual.
Yeah. Although she is interested in kind of the cultural temperature, isn't she?
Yeah, she is. But it's said of her that no one has ever seen her finish a book. And I think that that is kind of widely believed. And he complains of a quality that will be repeatedly applied to her, which is her légèreté, her frivolity, her lightness. The fact that she is not a heavy person, I think it would be fair to say.
But he also acknowledges that she has great charm. She has great poise. She is also not conventionally pretty because she has the classic protuberant lower lip of a Habsburg. But she has, the Abbé says, a perfect porcelain complexion. She has brilliant blue eyes.
She has a very sweet, oval face. So basically, you know, she will do.
Robert Danson, in his book, The Revolutionary Temper, says that when the pamphleteers, newspapers and whatnot, were talking about her in France, they all said, she's actually very nice looking. You know, she's blonde hair, beautiful, pale complexion. She looks like a queen.
She does. And, as we will see, she becomes a great icon of beauty and fashion and style. And there's a kind of symbolic moment where she ceases to be Austrian and becomes French, which is, you know, she's traveling up from Vienna with her 57 carriages. And on the 7th of May, 1770, they reach the Rhine and there's an island in the middle of it. And this wooden pavilion has been built that looks like a kind of, you know, a perfectly tiny chateau.
And it has five rooms inside it. And there's kind of two on the Austrian side, two on the French side, and there's a kind of room in the middle. And Marie Antoinette goes into the Austrian rooms. She's divested of her clothes down to her kind of underwear. She's then put into a French ceremonial dress.
She's led into the central drawing room. The door leading into the French rooms is opened. She looks back. The Austrian doors have been shut. All the Austrian servants have vanished.
And Marie Antoinette is handed over to this terrifying woman, who is the maitresse d'etiquette, the woman who is going to instruct her in the ritual of the court, called the Comtesse de Neuilly.
What was that noise?
Comtesse de Neuilly. Neuilly. Neuilly.
Yeah, it's just too many vowels. There's basically four vowels in that.
Neuilly. Scrabble heaven.
Yeah, it is.
Marie Antoinette bursts into tears at the sight of this terrifying woman, flings herself into the Comtesse's arms. The Comtesse, massively embarrassed, very stiff, shrugs her off, performs a low curtsy. Marie Antoinette apologises and says, pardon me, these are for the family in the fatherland. I am leaving. For the future, I shall not forget that I am French.
And the Comtesse de Neuilly says, yeah, you better not. I'm here to whip you into shape. So off they go.
And Tom, just one thing. She is 14 years old. She's not yet 15.. Imagine what an unbelievably terrifying moment this must be for her.
And what makes it even worse, she has an adorable little dog who she has to leave behind, but we'll come to that later. It's a crucial part of the story. Anyway, on they rattle, and it takes them a week to meet with the Dauphin and the French king. And they do it outside the forest of Compiègne. And the Dauphin and the Dauphine, as Marie Antoinette now is, are introduced.
Three days later, they are married. And she is now the queen of France.
Just on the marriage, Tom, one bad omen, one very dark omen. Anyone who knows about Russian history, they will spot the resemblance. Nicholas II and Alexandra, when they were crowned, there was a massive stampede afterwards, and hundreds of people were killed. Well, after the marriage of the Dauphin and Marie Antoinette, there was another stampede. There's a fireworks display.
that goes horribly wrong. Perhaps 150 people were killed in the crush.
And doesn't a firework kind of drop onto a tent?
Right, exactly. There were two rival fireworks designers, a man called Monsieur Torre and a guy called Ruggieri. And Ruggieri goes second, so he wants to outdo the other bloke. It's an incredibly elaborate fireworks display. It goes wrong.
A firework falls onto this temple that he's built, a temple of Hymen. And in the crush, 150 people are killed. And so whenever people look back later on, they say, doomed from the start, what a bad omen. We should never have got involved with this Austrian woman. The fireworks were a warning.
Yeah, there's kind of great emblem, isn't there, of the arms of France and the arms of the Habsburgs, kind of intertwined. And the fact that it has generated this disaster, as you say, is seen as an omen. And I think that that reflects the fact that the French don't only hate the Austrians, but kind of look down on them, because Austria, relative to France, has been declining since the 16th century. And France now is, with the exception of Russia, it's by far the largest kind of European realm. In the 18th century, it's been described as the China of Europe.
It has.
by far the largest population. 28 million. Yeah. Twice, as big as Britain. And Britain even with.
Ireland. Yeah. So it has kind of geopolitical power. It has population, as you said, and it has massive cultural prestige. And, of course, the great symbol of this cultural prestige is the place where Marie Antoinette has gone and where she will spend much of her life, which is the enormous palace of Versailles.
It's where they're married. This enormous palace, kind of 700 rooms, 2000 windows. The roofs cover a hundred hectares. I mean, on an enormous scale. And it's basically the physical embodiment of the style of government that the French monarchy represents, which is a kind of monarchical absolutism.
Yeah. I mean, the French monarchy had always been powerful, but since the 16th and then through the 17th, and definitely into the 18th century, it's monopolized power more and more. And, of course, the figure who exemplifies that is the great grandfather of Louis XV and predecessor Louis XIV, who had basically annihilated the nobility as an independent political class. He had required them to come to Versailles, and they are merely planets orbiting the sun. Yeah.
Sun king. The sun king. And so Versailles sets fashion, manners, everything for the whole of Europe. So, the great rival of Louis XIV, the Duke of Marlborough, he celebrates his victories over Louis XIV by building a kind of ersatz Versailles.
Yeah. Blenheim Palace.
Blenheim Palace. But I think that for Marie Antoinette, and indeed pretty much for everybody, I mean, it's a very oppressive place, isn't it?
It's awful. So she's growing up in the Habsburg court, which is much more informal and is becoming more informal during her childhood. But the French courts, I mean, it's partly because it's governed by this very, very strict ceremonial hierarchical rules, but also it is a kind of snake pit of politics, isn't it? With people jostling for power the whole time.
Yes. And one of the problems for Marie Antoinette is that her patron, Dr. Choiseul, falls from power only a few months after her marriage. And he'd been her sponsor, her protector. And that means that she's just a very young girl, teenager, and she's surrounded by people who hate her and hate Austria.
So the aunts of the Dauphin, so Louis XV's daughters, they hate Austria. Also, the Dauphin has younger brothers, and one in particular, the Comte de Provence, who in due course, vastly in the future, and I use the word vastly advisedly, will become Louis XVIII. I mean, a man of colossal size. But at this point, he's still very young. He's just a teenager himself, but he's consumed with resentment of the fact that he's not going to be king.
So he's a potential.
snake. A younger brother who turns out to be a snake. That will never happen in monarchical.
history again, will it, Tom? Never again. There are certain parallels to contemporary royals that we'll be teasing out over the course of this series, I think. So poor Marie Antoinette feels completely cut off and she complains that all her correspondence is being looked at, that nowhere that she locks anything is safe. I mean, this is the kind of treatment that all foreign queens in Versailles put through.
They are kind of there as hostages as much as anything else. And they're not expected to have a good time. You know, they're not expected to enjoy themselves. But, Marie Antoinette, she's strong enough. And right from the beginning, it's clear that she's a much stronger character than her husband.
And it's clear that when she becomes queen, she is going to kick back against this kind of formality. So there's a kind of classic moment where, for some reason, she's riding on a donkey. It's the kind of thing, I guess, you know, a teenage girl might enjoy doing, but that the contestant really disapproves of. So she falls off the donkey and she kind of makes this witty quip that she'd better send to the contest to find out what the etiquette is for a dauphine falling off a donkey. And you can see there that this is an attitude that is going to rub up against a lot that has made Versailles tick.
However, having said that, that, she's resentful of the kind of the formality and the stiffness of it all. There is also the fact that Versailles, particularly under Louis XV, is a kind of showcase for unsettling displays of royal libertinism. Because Louis XV, although personally quite a kind of modest and shy person, he's a bit of.
a dirty old man as well. I mean, from morning till night, he only ever thinks about one thing. Is it not true that the first thing he said when he was told about Marie Antoinette's existence?
No, it's when she's arrived. Oh, right. When she's arrived. And the first thing he says is, does she have large breasts? I mean, that is, that's bad form.
And he's disappointed to learn.
that she doesn't. From your father-in-law, you don't want to hear it, do you? No. And he's been.
a great man for mistresses. He had a very celebrated mistress, Madame du Pompadour, but she's gone. And the new mistress, the Comtesse du Barry, who's been elevated to that title, she's a kind of former courtesan. And she has, I mean, it's a kind of semi-formal title, the Maitresse Antique. But Marie Antoinette is appalled by this.
You know, she's been raised a devout Catholic. There's nothing like this in Vienna. And so she defies court protocol by refusing to even speak to the Comtesse du Barry. And Maria Theresa, her mother, is furious about this because she's trying to get France to back her in a kind of dispute over a chunk of Poland. Yeah.
And she says, look, you've got to talk to Madame du Barry. You know, I need you to do this. So Marie Antoinette does eventually. And she says to Madame du Barry, there are many people at.
Versailles today. And there's great cheering. Finally. Hurrah. Yeah.
The dam is broken.
Yeah. She never says anything else. Okay. But fortunately for Marie Antoinette, neither Madame du Barry nor Louis XV are long for the world, because on the 27th of April 1774, Louis XV falls ill. And gossip will say Madame du Barry has supposedly sourced a young peasant girl for him.
And the valet has brought this peasant girl in and the peasant girl turns out to have had smallpox. And so his whole face ends up. a great super rating mass of pustules. A bronze mask enlarged by the crusts is what it said. Oh, my word.
That's nice. So that thing that you just.
said there, gossip has it or rumour has it. That's really, really important, because this is an age where the court is kind of hermetically sealed off from Paris and therefore from the rest of France. And so most people learn about the King and Queen through rumour and gossip. And this is an age when there are pamphlets, ballads. It's a very literate, very news friendly society in a way that has not.
really existed before. And, Dominic, what is more is that you say that it's hermetically sealed. I mean, it kind of is in one way, but in another way. it isn't because all the different factions in Versailles are leaking stuff. Yes.
So the scandalous stories that are told about the Queen and, in due course, about Marie Antoinette, you know, these are not coming from disgruntled Republicans. They're coming from power players at the very heart of the court, often from the royal family itself. So the wellspring of all the gossip and slander that will overwhelm Marie Antoinette in the period of the revolution has been established by Versailles itself. Anyway, so whether Louis the 15th is dying because he's been brought, you know, a peasant girl by his mistress or not is up for grabs. But what is clear is that on the 10th of May, 1774, he dies.
The news is brought to the Dauphin and there's kind of amazing descriptions of how the sound of the news being brought to him and of people running to come and tell him. it's like a kind of swelling tidal wave. The King is long live the King. And the Dauphin is with Marie Antoinette. Of course, he's no longer the Dauphin, he's now Louis the 16th.
And there are various accounts of what they say when they're told the news. But the most celebrated one is that they fall to their knees and cry out, may God guide and protect us, for we are too young to reign. Because they were 18 and 19,, something like that. And I think they're aware that France faces massive problems. But Marie Antoinette later writes to Maria Theresa, her mother, and says, I cannot refrain from admiring the workings of providence, which has chosen me, the youngest of your children, to occupy the finest throne in Europe.
But the question is, Dominic, what will she do with that power? Well, we'll find out, Tom,
after the break.
Welcome back to The Rest is History. Anyone could see that Marie Antoinette would dominate the new King. So says John Hardman in his book, Marie Antoinette, the making of a French queen. Now, that idea that Louis the 16th, who, of course, is a very ill-fated king, because, as most of our listeners will know, he ends up having an appointment with the guillotine. Is it fair to say, Tom, that he is merely her puppet?
He is a weaker man, isn't he, the Marie Antoinette? Let's talk about their relationship a bit. Do they get on? Are they?
a happy couple, would you say? There are significant incompatibilities. So we could just go through some of them. So one is attitudes to music. Marie Antoinette is very, very musical.
She can play the harp. She can play the harpsichord. She can play the flute. Her brother, Joseph II, who is ruling, along with Maria Theresa, his mother, is the great patron of Mozart. Marie Antoinette had met Mozart when they were six years old.
Imagine meeting Mozart when you're the same age. You'd feel so inadequate, wouldn't you?
I know. So she is very, very musical. Louis the 16th is notoriously hostile to the arts, and to music in particular. This becomes a kind of topic of gossip. So in the pamphlets, people laugh at him for his lack of musicality.
He's like a British culture secretary.
Yes, he is. That's exactly what he is. No knowledge of the arts or interest in any.
of the music or anything like that. He might once have seen Star Wars, but that would be the limit of his cultural engagement. Then, of course, we mentioned the dog that Marie Antoinette was not allowed to bring into France because it was an Austrian dog. This dog was called Mops, and it was a pug. This, I think, is basically what makes her burst into tears and fall onto the bosom of the Comtesse de Neuilly.
It's being deprived of the dog, but listeners will be glad and relieved to know that she does, in due course, get reunited with Mops. Oh, lovely. So that's happy. Louis hates dogs. More particularly, I'm sad to say, as a cat owner,
he hates cats. He's right in that regard, but hating dogs is madness. It's madness. Cats are rubbish.
No, he's not. He's absolutely not, because he takes it to an unacceptable degree. As a dauphin, his favourite activity was to shoot cats on the roofs of Versailles.
My wife is allergic to cats, so she would very much approve of that, Tom.
Basically, he's shooting strays. This, apparently, is acceptable for sport in Versailles, but he accidentally shoots the Angora cat of the Comtesse de Meurepoix. When he does this, he's actually very upset, and he apologises profusely. I think it's a story that does sum up an aspect of his character, which is that on one level, he's very heedless of the suffering, whether of cats or of people out in the fields of La France Profonde. On another level, when he's informed of individual examples of suffering, he's very upset about it and worried.
about it. I think you're too harsh, though. I don't think he's any more heedless than anybody else. sealed off in the Palace of Versailles would be. Right, but I think, if you're shooting, stray.
cats, I mean, you just assume this is the kind of thing that a king does, or it's an acceptable sport, but when it's brought home to him what the implications are, then he worries about it. I think you could say the same about his relationship to the broader troubles out in France, that he's not aware of it until he's informed about it, and then he doesn't really.
know what to do. I guess so. He's not casual about it. He's perhaps slightly oblivious to it. His big thing is hunting, isn't it?
We've had two tremendous huntsmen on the rest of history recently, Franz Ferdinand and the Kaiser. And Custer. That would be a brilliant hunting party with those four men. Because Louis XVI is a tremendous huntsman. He absolutely adores it, and he keeps a journal where he writes down how many animals he's killed.
So the famous thing that everybody says on the day of the fall of the Bastille in 1789, that he wrote in his journal, rien, as in nothing happened today. That's rubbish. Actually, the nothing was because he hadn't killed any animals that day. So a very disappointing day. I mean, I think it's also fair.
to say that he's not a great diarist. So on the day he meets Marie Antoinette, he says, met Mademoiselle La Dauphine. And the day his mother dies, he says, my mother died.
Okay. Like Camus' L'Etranger. My mother died today or yesterday. I don't remember.
It's obviously a French tradition. Who knew? Yeah. Yeah. So he's not a great diarist.
And, as you said, he is a great huntsman. But I think one of the reasons why he adores it so much is that he's very good at it. You know, he's a very good horseman. But when he's on his own two feet, he's incredibly kind of maladroit, and socially as well as physically. So he hates dancing.
He's not good at kind of chit chat. You know, all the stuff that people at Versailles are doing, he doesn't really like it. And basically, he has the soul of a naval engineer. So he loves fleets, he loves harbors, and he loves tinkering with locks. You know, he has his own workshop.
Oh, I love this stuff. Simon Sharma is brilliant on this. So he's got this study, hasn't he? With all these maps and nautical instruments. And he will just sit there with a lock, like messing around, you know, surrounded by all this stuff.
He's like a tinkering inventor. And actually, I think that comes over as quite endearing.
Yeah, so Sharma writes, the struggle to make the perfect lock, so this is something that Louis XVI is doing, was a symbol of sublime aptness for the monarch, who repeatedly failed to make things turn as he wished. But in his appartement privé, he moved silently in his plain frock coat, amidst polished lenses, armillary spheres, burnished brass and orreries, with all the freedom and.
power of Omegas. I love that. So good, isn't it? I mean, let me just say one thing right at the outset. For those people who haven't read it, or have maybe heard about it and just can't be because it's quite long.
Simon Sharma's book, Citizens.
Is insanely enjoyable.
Is just. I mean, I know it's always tempting to be revisionist and to say of a great historian and a great book, that's actually rubbish. It is tip top. It is brilliant.
And has great pictures as well. It does. Yeah. So Marie Antoinette would have enjoyed that.
Yes, she would. She would have looked at the pictures. That's nice.
But, Dominic, just to say that there is an alternative perspective on this. Yeah. Which is the perspective of pamphleteers, one of whom describes him as a zombie who spends his time making locks and bolts. And you may wonder, well, where is this tone coming from? I think it's coming from the Prince Harry of Versailles, who is the Comte de Provence.
Right. Who is consumed with envy and spleen. So he is feeding all kinds of kind of hostile material out to the pamphleteers. But I think it also reflects the fact that the ultimate incompatibility, it seems, certainly in the early years of the marriage, is sexual. And if there's one thing that a French king is supposed to do, it's to be sexually voracious.
So it is better to be Louis the 15th, you know, an absolute goat.
Who is this bloke's grandfather, by the way, just to clarify.
Yeah. And to be sexually incompetent. Yeah. Which is clearly what Louis the 16th is. And it takes them seven years to consummate the marriage.
And there's much debate at the time. And there is much debate to this day about what the problem was. So a favoured thesis is that Louis the 16th suffered from a condition called phimosis, which basically means that the foreskin covers the head of the penis, which means erections become very painful. I think the consensus now, I gather, I don't quite know how they've arrived at this consensus, is that this isn't the case.
Theo has written in the chat, thanks, Tom. And I'm sure many of the listeners are also very grateful to you for that slightly unnecessary detail.
It's not unnecessary, because actually the question of why the king and queen are not having children is a matter of profound state.
And, as discussed, Tom, at the highest level. So Joseph II, who is the emperor of Austria and who's Marie Antoinette's brother, she must have told him about it, because he writes to another brother and says, I mean, I'm not going to go into all the gory details, but he basically says, they do try to have marital relations. Louis, and I quote, stays there without moving for perhaps two minutes and then says, good night, you know.
Withdraws and says, okay.
Yeah. I was omitting that detail.
But it's important, isn't it?
Anyway, he says, good night. Thank you very much. All good. And they're not actually completing the necessary act. And basically they need doctors or courtiers or whoever to explain to them.
Well, according to tradition, Joseph II makes that report after he's been on a trip to Versailles and he's spoken to both the king and the queen. Yeah. And the tradition is, is that he explains what needs to be done to Louis XVI with reference to a lock and a key.
Right. Yeah. He would enjoy the lock analogy. I find the whole thing slightly implausible, but anyway.
But there's no question that this makes him a kind of object of some contempt, which in many ways is unfair, because I think you're right. You know, he is dutiful, he is hardworking, he is conscientious. He does develop a reputation for kindness, maybe cats accepted. So Chantal Thomas writes, for a sovereign, the line between goodness and imbecility was easily crossed. And I think that Louis XVI is on that line, that people can admire him as a good man.
Yeah. While simultaneously despising him as someone who is incompetent or useless as a sovereign.
He's not an impressive man. He's not a charismatic or formidable man. He doesn't inspire respect. He's probably quite a nice man, but a weak man. Is that fair, Tom?
I think, probably, yes. I think it's felt that he is not of royal material really. But having said that, whether it's Joseph II or not, who managed to explain to him what he's got to do, they do finally get together. And Marie Antoinette gives Louis four children, including, crucially, two sons. So a dauphin and a spare, which is obviously very important.
And they end up, you know, quite a devoted couple. Amazingly, he doesn't take a mistress. So, on one level, that of course only enhances the idea of him that he's not a kind of the libertine.
He's not an alpha male.
He's not an alpha male. But on another, he's kind of upholding an almost bourgeois standard of marital fidelity. He banishes Madame du Barry, who gets packed off. And Madame du Barry, like Madame du Pompadour before her, had this splendid kind of grace and favor residence in the grounds of Versailles, kind of a little chateau called the Petit Trianon. And Louis gives this to Marie Antoinette.
So now it's the queen's. And she absolutely loves it. You know, we've talked about how resentful and hostile she is to the kind of stifling etiquette of Versailles. The Petit Trianon offers her a bolt hole. And it gives her the perfect opportunity to vent all her qualities of spontaneity and simplicity.
and impulse that she loves. So on that, you were saying about her not reading a book. Simon Schama says in Citizens, like all adolescent girls of her generation, she drank deep at the well of sentimental literature. Her library was full of Samuel Richardson, Rousseau, Mercier, Restive de Breton, et cetera. Now, her library was full of them.
Maybe she didn't necessarily read them. But, as Schama says, she is steeped in the culture that is the most modern, fashionable, forward looking. She's not stuck in the mud. She's not a relic of the Ancien Régime. She's interested particularly in the stuff that people associate with the philosopher, the thinker Rousseau, which are virtue, simplicity, nature, a sort of,
as you said, spontaneity. Yeah. And these are all qualities that will come to be seen in due course as features of the revolution. Yeah. But Marie Antoinette is a massive enthusiast for them, so much so that, amazingly, in 1782, she goes and visits Rousseau's grave outside Paris.
So she's a kind of a pilgrim. You think she's picked up the ideas, but not read the books,
basically? I don't know. I mean, she's probably skimmed through it. I think that's perfectly.
possible too, by the way. I mean, that's how most people actually pick up fashionable ideas, isn't it? These days that you pick them up on Facebook or in conversation, you don't necessarily.
read the Wellspring. Yeah. And she is, for that reason, very, very fashionable, because her lack of enthusiasm for fashion, as prescribed by Versailles itself, becomes the fashion. And the enthusiasm for Rousseau, the idea that one should lead a simple, unadorned life and that this is the key to virtue. At the Petit Trianon, the emphasis is on hiding the presence of servants.
So in Versailles, it's all about having as many servants as possible. You know, every time Marie Antoinette gets dressed, hundreds of maids surround her to do it. And the Petit Trianon is different. And kind of famously, she commissions a landscape architect to design her an amouristique, a kind of a rustic hamlet, a rustic village that has cows with ribbons on, alpine sheep, a watermill. And this, of course, becomes notorious because it's the idea of a queen pretending to be a shepherdess that strikes up all kinds of unfortunate resonances.
But, you know, she is the embodiment.
of fashion. But only notorious because the revolution happens. Yeah, I think so. You know, had France's finances been in better shape, and there's no revolution. People would be charmed by this.
Yeah, people would say it's an entertaining quirk of 18th century, you know, monarchical life.
They wouldn't think anything of it. Yeah. And far from kind of saying that the poor should eat cake, she's very worried about the poor. Okay. I mean, the poor as kind of represented by photogenic paupers who can be given charity by her.
She's the Angelina Jolie of the 18th century, Tom. Yes. So, 1785, she lodges and feeds 12 poor families at the Petit Trianon. So she's very like a celebrity. Yeah.
And there's a quality of the fact that I think she's very impressed by the sense she has of her own virtue. Right. And she wants people to know about it, while simultaneously, genuinely being worried about it. I mean, all of those things can be true. Of course.
And she wants to make sure that her children are raised in this. She's a very, very good mother, a very attentive mother. So, 1784, the year before that, it had been a terrible winter. And she provides her children with what one of her companions describes as a lesson in doing good by bringing in a great kind of pile of toys and then saying, you can't have these because we're going to sell these toys and use them to get blankets and bread among children in need. Oh, that's quite surprising.
Yeah. Very.
celebrity on Twitter. It's very Dickensian, I think. Yeah, it's very Dickensian. That as well.
So Chantal Thomas describes this wonderfully. She was fond of charity and never tired of the spectacle of her own goodness. So I think, again, she is a precursor of a kind of modern type of celebrity there, kind of celebrity charity. The Duchess of Sussex, Tom. Yeah, a slight quality there.
So that's on the kind of the moral level. But she also creates this kind of new, kind of fashion that is absolutely repudiating, the kind of stiff formality of Versailles. So she has this dressmaker, Rose Bertin, who shockingly is allowed ready access to her apartment. Yeah. You know, she doesn't go through all the court protocols.
that normally restricts people who can see the Queen. And basically, Marie Antoinette is kind of discarding all the rich silks of the court for flowing white Muslims, for kind of simple costumes, fresh flowers, kind of bucolic adornments. Right. And not only that, she stops.
wearing corsets and stays and all those things that kind of really button you up. Yeah. Again, it's very Russo. Go back to nature. It's going back to nature.
I mean, the Shama says you can actually see what her body looks like under the dress, which, of course, is not the case with the incredibly rigid and structured dresses that people are wearing. It's not. they're wearing them earlier. They're wearing them at the same time. But she is breaking with the rules of French.
kind of hierarchical dress. Absolutely. And, you know, I said that Marie Antoinette, in a way, invents modern fashion. And she does that because she is, whatever the French say, she is the Queen of France. For that reason, she has the highest profile of any woman in Europe, but also because she's a genius at it.
And the idea of waking up every morning and just deciding what you want to wear, you know, what clothes you're going to have, how you're going to do your hair, rather than having it prescribed according to rigid structures is something revolutionary, you know, literally revolutionary, because this is the style of fashion that will come in during the French Revolution. And Marie Antoinette, to that extent, I think, is the godmother of France's modern reputation as the home of fashion. And we've talked about clothes. There is also hair. So there's an absolutely wonderful book with the great title Marie Antoinette's Head, by Will Bashoor, which is about her hairdresser, who is a man called Monsieur Leonard, who we'll feature throughout the story.
And again, this is very, very shocking that he's a male hairdresser, not a lady's maid. He's a celebrity hairdresser. And, like Madame Bertin, has ready access to her. So there's something very, very diva about this. I mean, it's absolutely recognizable.
And he gives her a whole succession of kind of unbelievably grandiose hairstyles. So the hairstyle that Marie Antoinette is initially promoting is called Le Pouf Sentimental.
The sentimental pouf. I mean, that's a hard sentence to carry off, right?
You can imagine that kind of teased up gauze and plumes and things. Very, very risky, because, you know, there are candles in the chandeliers. So if you brush against it, it might just go up in flames. And there are various kind of styles. So you have the Erysant, which is unpowdered hair.
So that's kind of going back to nature there. And they're kind of curled to the tips and rising in tears. So it looks like an Erysant, a hedgehog. There's the Zephyr, which is flowers woven into the hair. So again, there's the sense that you're moving from kind of stiff formality to nature.
And then, in 1781, Monsieur Léonard is summoned by Marie Antoinette, who's distraught because she feels that she's losing her hair. You know, hair is thinning. And Monsieur Léonard is devastated by this. And he goes away and he thinks about it. And then he comes back and he does something revolutionary.
He cuts her hair. He gives her the coiffure à l'enfant, a child's hairstyle. He starts to decorate it only with flowers, not with jewels. And it creates this fashion for natural hairstyles that spreads across Versailles, spreads across Paris, spreads across.
France, spreads across Europe. And she has people who are around her, doesn't she? You use the expression, her squad, which may sound like Taylor Swift. But she does have this coterie of very, very close friends who will later become, like her, controversial. Some of whom, frankly, are doomed to incredibly tragic and blood-curdling ends.
Yes. So there are two in particular. There's.
the Duchess de Polignac, who, I mean, is very, very beautiful, exquisite manners, absolutely adores kind of gossip and intrigue. So I think it's kind of less Taylor Swift. It's more the plastics in Mean Girls, which I know you haven't seen, but which I, as a parent of two daughters, have seen a lot. A brilliant, brilliant film. And I think that anyone who's seen that film, if you think of Marie Antoinette and the Duchess de Polignac as the plastics, who are the kind of queen bees in a high school.
And then there's this sidekick who's always trying to make fetch happen, the word fetch. And she never does. And I think that that character would be the Princess de Lamballe, who is very, very vapid. There's a kind of brilliantly bitchy account of her by the Comtesse de Gemli. She never had an opinion of her own.
In conversation, she always adopted the opinion of the person who passed for the wittiest in a way that was utterly unique. Whenever there was a serious discussion, she never spoke, pretending to fall into a trance. Then she suddenly appeared to snap out of her reverie and repeat word for word, as though it came from her, what the person whose opinion she had decided to adopt had just said. She affected great surprise when told someone had just said the same thing. She assured everyone she hadn't heard of it.
So I think you get there a sense that Marie Antoinette likes these people precisely because they are not witty. They are not brilliant. She can enjoy their company. Inevitably, gossip will say that they're all lesbians, that they're all engaging in sapphic rites. The Duchess de Polignac in particular, who becomes widely, widely hated, but both of them are strongly disliked.
There are also male guests going to the Petit Trianon, of whom the most notorious is a dashing Swedish officer called Axel von Fersen, who is the son of a field marshal and who had met Marie Antoinette at a masked ball at the opera in 1774, when she was still the Dauphine, and he hadn't recognized her, which is obviously a kind of great thrill for Marie Antoinette. And from that point on, there are regular visits. The two indisputably become close. Again, it is taken for granted that they are sleeping. I think this is most unlikely.
Because it's not really in her character, you think?
Yeah, it's not her style. And it would be mad for her to do that. But there is clearly a kind of heedlessness about this. I mean, to have these kind of very close, intimate relationships and to kind of thumb her nose at the formalities and the hierarchies of Versailles to bring down everything that the Comtesse de Neuil had represented. I mean, she's building up trouble for herself.
She is. There's an amazing quotation, actually from her brother, Joseph II, who wrote to their brother, Leopold. And he said, she has no etiquette. She goes out and runs around alone or with a few people, without the outward signs of her position. She looks a little improper.
And while this would be all right for a private person, she is not doing her job. And that is the issue, isn't it? She's not playing the part of a French queen, as the French people expect.
No, she's not. And I think what is more and even more damaging for her is that she's actually playing the part of a mistress. Because the Petit Trianon is where the mistress lives. And queens are not supposed to live like mistresses. So over the course of Louis XVI's reign, going into the 1780s, she's coming to be hated, as queens often are hated as kind of the embodiment of royal arrogance and of kind of absolutism.
But she's also being hated as favorites are. She's being cast as a kind of a voracious, greedy, blood-sucking nymphomaniac. And the pair of these images are kind of being fused, because a mistress is always being accused of extravagance.
Yeah. Comes from the territory, right?
That's what they're there to do. And, kind of amazingly, stories start to be repeated that Marie Antoinette is literally maintaining, at the expense of the state, a whole tank full of leeches, which is a kind of horrible idea.
Yeah. That sort of metaphor. Yeah.
And also, of course, mistresses, are sexually promiscuous. And so this is why the stories that she's having, you know, sapphic affairs and sleeping with, you know, Swedish officers and things like that. It's why they have such currency.
And the interesting thing about that, Tom, is that they start, I think it's Robert's answer makes this point, that they start in 1774, so 15 years before the revolution, and when she's still only 18, 19 years old. So very early on, these stories, that she has this kind of voracious sexual appetite, that her Locke-obsessed husband is not satisfying, and that, you know, there's this kind of extravagance and depravity sucking the energy and the money out of France. They start very early, don't they?
She's never able to shake them. Right. And to reiterate, because I think this is so important, these stories are not coming from Republican people who hate the monarchy. It's coming from her rivals at the court. These are the people who are spreading it.
And it reflects a character of libertinism that you get at the court, that Louis XV had exemplified, and which you get in Laclos' great novel, Dangerous Liaisons, as it's translated to people who've seen the film. I mean, the whole thing is about debauching people, the idea that the aristocracy are cruel and sexually predatory. And, of course, the writer who absolutely exemplifies this is the Marquis de Sade, who we did an episode on. And there's a sense in which the Marquis de Sade is reworking ideas that are very, very current in pornography at the time. And Marie Antoinette, who had refused to speak to Madame du Barry, because, you know, she'd been a courtesan, who had been so unsexually voracious that, you know, the marriage hadn't been consummated for seven years.
She comes to be the protagonist of pornographic fantasies that are increasingly revolting and shocking in the way that the Marquis de Sade's writings are. revolting and shocking. And listeners may be wondering, well, does any of this matter? And it does matter because it comes to threaten the reputation not just of the queen, but of the king and of the monarchy itself. The thing is that in the early 1780s, all these rumors and stories and fantasies, they lack an obvious focus.
They are underground. They are being percolated by kind of court rivalries. But then, in 1784, there's an absolute catastrophe because Marie Antoinette finds herself engulfed in a complete firestorm of scandal. And actually, Dominic, it's not just a scandal. It's an affair.
The affair of the diamond.
necklace. It's an amazing story. It is an absolutely incredible story. And you'll be taking us through this tomorrow, actually, won't you? People don't have to wait.
It's tomorrow. Yes. Because we're going to be running this series over the next two weeks. Now, if you want to hear about the affair of the diamond necklace, and then we'll be getting into the calling of the States General, the fall of the Bastille, the course of the revolution, the ideas behind the revolution, and then the rising panic and terror of the king and queen and their decision to flee France, which obviously ends up going wrong. If you want to listen to all that right away, you can do so by being a member of the Restless History Club.
If you're not a member already, you can subscribe at therestlesshistory.com. But, Tom, thank you so much for that. I think there's only one expression, given that we are in 18th century France, that was a genuine tour de force. Thank you very much, Dominic. And on that bombshell, au revoir everybody, and see you tomorrow.
Bye-bye.
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