476. The French Revolution: The Diamond Necklace Scandal (Part 2)
2024-07-29 00:47:45
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No, my lord count, you will not have her. You will not have her. Because you are a great noble man, you think you are a great genius. Nobility, fortune, rank, position, how proud they make a man feel. What have you done to deserve such avantage?
Put yourself to the trouble of being born, nothing more. For the rest, a very ordinary man. Whereas I, lost among the obscure crowd, have had to deploy more knowledge, more calculation, and skill merely to survive than has sufficed to rule all the provinces of Spain for a century. Yet you, Tom Hollande, would measure yourself against me. So that, Tom, is the most famous speech in the most celebrated and controversial play that was staged in the reign of Louis XVI.
And that play is The Mardais, or The Marriage of Figaro, by Pierre Beaumarchais. And that first appeared in April.
1784.. And today's episode is about the scandal of the diamond necklace. So, before we get into the diamond necklace and what it means for Marie Antoinette, for Louis XVI, and for the French Revolution, tell us why you've chosen to kick off with The Marriage of Figaro and what is going on.
That was excellent reading. I loved the kind of the Gaelic laughter. But, Dominic, I mean, just one thing, shouldn't he have had a Spanish accent because Figaro is Spanish?
I did think about that. I did think about that. But the French are pretty uncompromising, aren't they, when it comes to this kind of thing. So I think they would not have done a Spanish accent. They would have been unrepentantly Gaelic about it.
And that was what I was trying to.
convey. Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. So The Marriage of Figaro, which, if people haven't seen the play, they may have seen the opera, which was adapted by Mozart. And it tells a story of the wedding day of Figaro, who is the servant of a lecherous and arrogant Spanish count called Count Almaviva.
And Figaro has just got married to Suzanne, who is the maid of the countess, the count's wife. And the count who is, I mean, he makes Louis XV, who we had in the previous episode, absolute model of chastity. Yeah. He wants to exercise the traditional doir de seigneur over Suzanne. So the right of a lord to bed, whoever of his dependents he wants to.
And all kinds of farcical shenanigans ensue, Dominic. Love a farcical shenanigan. So lots of cross-dressing, lots of hiding cupboards, jumping out of windows, all kinds of things like that. But the plot ends up in a garden by night, and the countess and Suzanne have kind of teamed up and they've got this plan to basically publicly humiliate the count and kind of get him to reform out of shame. And so to that end, they've swapped clothes so that the count will mistake his wife, the countess, for the maid, Suzanne, and vice versa.
So it's a kind of classic French farce. And Figaro is worried that Suzanne is going to sleep with the count, even though they've just got married, furious about it. And so that's what's provoked the rant that you began this episode with. He's very upset that the count is behaving like this, understandably. And he also thinks that Suzanne is betraying him.
And so he's assembled a large crowd to catch the count and Suzanne in flagrante, because he thinks this is what's going to happen. But it all ends very happily. Hurrah. Because Suzanne is very indignant that Figaro wouldn't trust her, reveals the whole plot to him. The couple are reconciled.
They have a kiss. The count sees them kissing and thinks that Figaro is getting off with his wife, the countess. Absolutely explodes, orders them all to be arrested. The crowd summoned by Figaro kind of assemble on the stage, you know, with flaming torches and everything. At this point, the countess emerges and reveals who she is.
The count realizes that he's been an absolute bounder, that he's been tricked. And there's a long pause, and then he falls to his knees and begs for forgiveness. In the opera, I mean, it's a stunningly beautiful moment. And the countess does forgive him and everyone is forgiven. And the last line of the plays, which is accompanied by music, is, everything finishes with songs.
So there's this idea that the class tensions and the iniquities of the aristocracy can be resolved with beautiful music.
But at the time, this play by Beaumarchais, 1784, incredibly controversial in France, because it was seen as so radical in that it was upturning the social order. There are lots of jokes and remarks and allusions to censorship or the way the justice system works, or the fear of being locked up in the Bastille. Now, you know, in Robert Darnton's brilliant book, The Revolutionary Temper, there's a whole chapter about the controversy about the marriage of Figaro and how that foreshadows the revolution. Yeah. And I mean, people listening to that praise me,
they were able to keep track of it. They may be wondering how could a farce like this have this kind of incredible reputation? I mean, it had it at the time and it had it in the revolution. So Darnton, who will be coming to, you know, one of the great revolutionary leaders, he says of it, it killed off the nobility. I mean, you might think, actually it's the guillotine that does that.
But Darnton says, no, it's the marriage of Figaro. And Napoleon says of the play, because we remember we did the episodes on the young Napoleon, didn't we? He loved the play. And he said that, you know, this is the revolution in action, avant la revolution. This is what the revolution is going to become.
So the obvious question then, if it is as incendiary as contemporaries thought, how on earth did it come to be staged? And not only come to be staged, but become, I mean, unbelievably famous, kind of in the way that a blockbusting Hollywood movie today might be going completely viral, copied, parodied. So, you know, the fact that Mozart turns it into an opera within two years of it being premiered is a kind of indication of the cultural cachet that it has and the celebrity and indeed the notoriety. And the truth is that the difficulty of getting it on stage becomes part of Beaumarchais' marketing strategy. So he gives the finished script to the Comédie-Française in 1781..
And they say, yeah, this is brilliant. It's a sequel to a previous play that had also featured Figaro in the count. So they're very keen to put it on, but it takes them three years to get on. And the reason for that is that the king is massively offended by it. He calls it detestable.
He particularly hates the speech that you just read, and he repeatedly tries to ban it. But he reckons without two things. And one of them is Beaumarchais himself, who is an amazing figure, incredibly charismatic, extraordinary life. He'd been a royal agent in London. He'd been sent there to protect Madame du Barry, Louis XV's mistress, from a libelous pamphlet.
He'd had all kinds of dealings with the Chevalier d'Eon, who is a diplomat, who people think may even have been female, but it's kind of a cross-dresser. And again, kind of cross-dressing is a kind of theme throughout The Marriage of Figaro. He ends up running guns to the Americans. He publishes the complete works of Voltaire, The Great Wit, and Philosophe. So an amazing guy and is brilliant at self-publicity.
And he uses the censorship battle to publicise the play. And he's able to do this by exploiting what we were talking about in the previous episode, that there are different factions in the court. And lots of the nobility who are opposed to the stuffiness of the king think it's very, very funny to get the play on. Yeah. And one of the people who thinks it's funny to get the play on is the queen herself,
Marie Antoinette. Who we talked about the last time, who's been behaving in a way that they think is not suitable for a queen because of her love, of the kind of Russo-ist nature and simplicity and stuff. And because she's kind of got a girlishness to her, a lightness. And French queens are meant to be heavy. And she thinks it's hilarious, doesn't she?
She thinks it's really.
funny. She does. So. Simon Schama in Citizen says, the more outrageous the denunciations of the established order, the better the queen liked it. And that's because the people that she doesn't.
get on with at the court are the kind of rigid, formal, old guard kind of people. And they're the kind of people, to some degree, who don't like this play and are being mocked by it, right? So she's naturally on the side of lightness and laughter, Tom.
Absolutely. And one of the king's brothers, so not the Comte de Provence, who is the kind of particularly embittered one, but the younger brother, the Comte d'Artois, who's very close to Marie Antoinette. I mean, he loves it as well. He pushes for it to be on. And so it becomes a massive, massive succès d'estime, not just among the ordinary mass of theatregoers, but among the nobility.
And again, Schama, in his account of this, quotes an aristocrat, Henriette de Freunstein, who describes all the aristocrats in the audience slapping themselves on their own cheeks, laughing at their own expense, and, even worse, making others laugh too, a strange blindness.
But talking of a strange blindness, so that's in the spring of 1784 that there's this farce, assignations, disguises, all of this kind of thing. And then, unbelievably, just weeks later, there will begin an affair, scandal, that makes the story of the Marriage of Figaro, the farcical goings on, look humdrum and unfunny, and colourless by comparison. And this is the beginning of this tremendous scandal, the affair of the diamond necklace, Tom. And this kicks off, am I right in saying, on the 11th of August, 1784.. So, just a few months later.
Yeah. So the Marriage of Figaro has premiered in the spring of 1784.. And, as you say, on the 11th August, an event happens that weirdly echoes the kind of the climactic scene in the Marriage of Figaro. But, as you said, ramps it up to a scandalous degree. So that evening, a Parisian milliner called Nicole Legay, who has been reduced to prostitution by the exactions of loan sharks, or so she says, is driven to Versailles.
And, to quote Jonathan Beckman, who is not only a historian but plays cricket with me, authors, but has written a brilliant account of the whole scandal, How to Ruin a Queen, his description of Nicole, she was young, pretty and broke. And with her broad forehead, her straight chiselled nose and her small protuberant mouth, she resembled Dominic, no one so much as Marie Antoinette. So she gets driven to Versailles. And she's greeted there by a woman who calls herself the Vicomtesse de Valois, who tells Nicole something amazing, that the Queen has personally requested that her, Nicole, do the Queen a favour. And that in return, Nicole will be given 15,000 livres, which is a lot of money for an impecunious prostitute.
Huge amounts of money. Yeah.
And more than that, because she's doing the Queen a favour, she will be given a title. And the Vicomtesse de Valois says that from this point on, Nicole will be known as the Baron d'Oliva. And that is O-L-I-V-A, which is kind of an anagram of Valois, almost an anagram of Valois.
What are the chances?
So Nicole's suspicions are not aroused by this, it has to be said at the time. In fact, she's just incredibly bewildered. But the chance to have a title and lots of money, I mean...
Yeah. Why wouldn't you take it?
Yeah. What's not to like? So she stayed at Versailles. The next day, she's dressed in kind of a plain but expensive white muslin dress. And people who heard our previous episodes will know that this is the kind of signature costume of Marie Antoinette herself.
And she's given a bonnet which covers her face, but kind of enables people to see her lips. The Vicomtesse, then hands, let's call her d'Oliva, because that's now her title, a tiny letter, and says that she is going to lead her into the park at Versailles, into one of the gardens. And that when she gets there, a noble seigneur will be waiting. And she's to hand this letter over, plus a rose. And that as she hands the letter and the rose over, she is to say to this seigneur, you know what this means.
And that's all she has to do. And so, at midnight, the Baron d'Oliva, as she seems to have become, is taken out into the gardens. And she is told, as she's being led, that the queen is watching her to make sure that she does everything that the queen has requested. So the Baron d'Oliva, Nicole, aka Nicole, the impecunious milliner, is standing in the gardens, you know, the kind of roses around, faint splashing of fountains. in the distance, the stars are blazing in the sky.
Not long afterwards, she sees a man approaching her. And this is a man in a long black cassock and a very kind of broad brimmed floppy hat. He comes up to her and the poor Baron is terrified. You know, she doesn't know who this person is. She's in the royal gardens, what's going on?
But she kind of summons up her courage and she hands over the rose. And she says, as she's been instructed to do, you know what this means. She's just about to hand over the letter when there's suddenly a kind of an uproar, torches in the distance, the sound of footsteps coming. And the Baron's arm is grabbed, pulled into the bushes. It's the Vicomtesse who's got hold of her, hurries her back, takes her into her private quarters.
And the Baron d'Oliva, Nicole, apologizes that she hasn't been able to hand over the letter. But nobody seems to care. Instead, there's a big meal, the wine flows, and they go to bed. And in the morning, the Vicomtesse shows Nicole, the Baron d'Oliva, a letter that she has received from Marie Antoinette. And she reads the letter out.
I'm very happy, my dear Countess, with the person you procured for me. She played her role to perfection. At this point, the Vicomtesse rips up the letter because she says it is not the kind of letter that one should carry around. So there is no evidence for any of this. that's happened.
Now, the Vicomtesse then hands over a third of the fee that's been promised. And then the Baron d'Oliva is driven back into Paris. From this point on, there is no further reference to her title. So she goes back to being Nicole and there is no further money. And that seems to be the end.
of the matter. I mean, all, very, very strange. And this is from Nicole's own account, isn't it?
Well, it's from the account of her lawyer. Yeah. Everything you're going to hear in this.
story comes from the accounts given by different lawyers to make money, publish memoirs of what.
their clients had told them. But also, Dominic, to be fair, to try and get their clients off,
as we will see. Yes, of course. So this is Nicole's story. So, Tom, a very kind of Mozart-friendly episode, this. It's very, very Mozart.
The Queen looking on, presumably a mysterious suitor. in the darkness, the rose is handed over, all of this kind of thing. I mean, it's made for an opera. Yeah. Turn on the lights for us and tell us, first of all, who is that mysterious man in the cassock that the Queen appears to be giving a rose to?
Well, he is an amazingly important figure in the French noble hierarchy. He's a man called Louis de Rohan, and he is a scion of the grandest non-royal family in France. So he traces his lineage back to the one-time kings of Brittany. The Rohan have this phrase,
I cannot be king, I won't be a prince, I am Rohan. Right. So it's better to be Rohan than to be a king or a prince. Ferdinand would agree with that, Tom. Of course, of course.
And in his role as a Rohan, he gets to inherit the Bishopric of Strasbourg, which brings with it a cardinalate. He inherits this and he becomes the Cardinal de Rohan. Right. And in his character, he's a very generous man, but in other ways, I mean, he's the kind of person who would very easily be taken in by a confidence trickster, I think it's fair to say. He's basically a character from a sort of Ben Johnson play or something, or a Moliere play.
He's the kind of person who, if he got an email from someone saying, I need your passport details and £100,000, please send it here, he would do it. Yeah. So there was an Abbe who'd been at the seminary with him when they were young, who remembered him as haughty, inconsiderate, unreasonable, spendthrift, not very bright, fickle in his tastes and his friendships. Right. But, as I say, he does have two good qualities.
He's very generous and Dominic, he's an Anglophile. So these are positives.
Tremendous, man, won't hear a word against him.
The problem is, though, that he has infuriated Marie Antoinette. Marie Antoinette hates him. And the reason for that is he'd gone to Vienna as ambassador. And because he's an Anglophile, he doesn't really like the Austrians. And he's always writing rude letters about Maria Teresa, Marie Antoinette's mother, to his confidants at Versailles.
And one of them reads out something rude, he said about Maria Teresa, and it gets back to Marie Antoinette. So she's very upset about this. And when he comes back from Vienna, he's in Versailles, he loves a bit of gossip, he's not very bright. He goes around accusing Marie Antoinette of having an affair with the Comte d'Artois, the younger brother of Louis XVI. It's very reckless of him.
Yeah. I mean, it's mad. And also, he says of the Queen, she displays a cockatishness that prepares the way for an accomplished lover to succeed with her. I mean, mad. Yeah, he's foolish, and he lets his tongue run away with him.
clearly. And people who've seen Dangerous Liaisons or read the book, the book by Leclerc, written exactly this period. I mean, this is exactly what's going on. It's people kind of gossiping about each other, overhearing it, reading letters that aren't meant for them, all this kind of thing. So it's absolutely part of the climate.
But the Cardinal de Rohan is not smart enough really to profit from it. And so he's distraught that he feels that Marie Antoinette is standing in the way of him, getting the kind of promotion that he feels should be his right as a Rohan. So he'll do anything to try and get her back. And it's at this point that an impecunious woman with a sob story approaches him. And this is a woman called Jeanne de Lamotte.
And she claims descent from the Valois, who are the traditional royal family who kind of gone extinct in the 16th century, being replaced by the Bourbon. But that's.
obviously just rubbish to appeal to the Cardinal, isn't it? I mean, she's a swindler. Well, this is.
the story. This is her story. And she approaches the Cardinal for some charity, which the Cardinal gives her. And almost certainly they have an affair. How does that work?
I'd like some charity,
please. Oh, my dear. I've got some charity upstairs. Come through. I think that's exactly.
how it works. Right. So the Cardinal is a notorious womaniser, as Cardinals in the Ancien Regime tend to be. They've got to be by law, surely. So, having done that, Lamotte then thinks, do you know what?
I'm going to aim higher. And amazingly, she wants to get quarters in Versailles. So she persuades the Cardinal to introduce her to one of the sisters of Louis XVI. And Lamotte has prepared for this moment very, very skillfully. So she's introduced to the sister of Louis XVI.
And she faints. She's kind of overcome. Whether this is staged or whether it's real, I mean, who knows? But the consequence of this is that she is seen as an unfortunate who has suffered terrible things and therefore needs to be helped. And this plays into the spirit of sentimentality and sensibility that is absolutely kind of current and associated with Marie Antoinette and her vibe at Versailles.
And so she gets these quarters. And using this, she starts telling the Cardinal that she's become great friends with the Queen herself. I mean, the Queen does have her,
you referred in the last episode as her squad. So it's not that impossible. I mean, it could happen.
Right. So the Cardinal completely believes it. And Lamotte then starts saying, you know, the only way to get to Marie Antoinette's heart is to buy her the most notorious necklace in France. It had been made by the court jewelers, Verma and Bassange, who had been commissioned by Louis XV to make this. It's called a kind of slave necklace because it looks like a kind of collar that a slave might wear.
And it consists of 647 diamonds. And these weigh 2,800 carats. So, I mean, it's massively vulgar. And so Jonathan Beckman describes it as grotesque and almost literally unbearable. It more resembled an item of chain mail or something a monk might wear in penitential self-chastisement, than a coveted piece of jewellery.
It's a necklace that Donald Trump would buy for a lady of the night.
Yes. For a porn star, perhaps. And unfortunately, the jewellers had never been able to give this to Madame du Barry, because Louis XV had died. And so, therefore, Madame du Barry had been chucked out of Versailles and wasn't in a position to buy it. And so they are stuck with this enormous bill and they need to sell it to someone.
And so the obvious person is Marie Antoinette. So they keep saying, Your Majesty, would you like to buy this? And it's not Marie Antoinette style at all. I mean,
it's kind of vulgar. And I think it's nature and simplicity and, like, you know, falling curls and.
no corset and all that stuff. Yeah. And on top of that, of course, it had been made for Madame du Barry. Yeah. It's not just vulgar.
It has associations with kind of courtesans. So absolutely not her. And also, she has been warned by both her mother and her husband, the king, you know, to stop displaying the bling, that it's not going down well. And also, Monsieur Leonard, who we talked about, the hairdresser, he has been phasing jewels out from her hairstyle, going for the natural look, the flowers. So basically, it's not her thing at all.
She does not want it. So you might think, well, you know, couldn't the cardinal have done some cursory research on this? And he'd realised this is a mad thing. Marie Antoinette would never have wanted this necklace. But it's at this point, Dominic, that another figure steps into the story.
And this is someone you're very keen on, isn't it? Yeah. It's an Italian occultist called, supposedly, the Comte de Cagliostro. Yeah.
So his story is enough to take up multiple podcasts, but just to absolutely condense it. He told multiple different stories. Some of them. he said he was the son of the master of the Knights of Malta, or a bigwig from Egypt, or an Ottoman pasha. There were stories that he was 300 years old.
No, even longer. Yeah. Stories that he'd been at the wedding in Cana. in the Bible, with Jesus and co. Basically, what seems to be the truth is that in reality, either he was born in Sicily, in the slums of Palermo, to a Jewish family, or he's the son of a coachman from Naples.
We don't know which. He seems to have had time as an apprentice hairdresser, which is a fun detail.
Yeah. A lot of hairdressers behaving badly in this. And then he basically becomes a swindler,
professional charlatan. He goes around. He says he's dreamed up a special Egyptian form of free masonry. He's got a fake countess wife, and she sells the package, basically, to aristocratic ladies. And he seems to have come into contact with the cardinal in Strasbourg in 1781..
And the cardinal, as you said, Tom, is an absolute flipping dupe. Gull. Yeah. I mean, that's the whole thing about being a character from a Moliere play. And that he believes all this stuff about free masonry.
on the occult. He believes that Cagliostro is an alchemist. And there are stories, aren't there? And I think they're probably not true, but there are stories that Cagliostro is in on the plot and held seances and occult rituals to persuade Roanne that the stuff about the necklace is true and that this is the way to Marie Antoinette's heart. And of course, the thing is, always with.
confidence tricks, is that people have to want desperately to believe that what they're being told is the case. And it's not just the cardinal who wants to believe it, the jewelers do as well, because they want to recoup their investment. So, November 1784, so this is a few months after the meeting in the gardens at Versailles, the cardinal gets a letter that has been signed, Marie Antoinette de France, which is a signature she would never use, because that's not diplomatic at all. And the cardinal, as a former diplomat, should have known this, but he doesn't. And in this letter, he gets informed that the cardinal is to acquire the necklace for the queen and that the queen will pay for it in four instalments.
So, brilliant. The jewelers are delighted, the cardinal is delighted, you know, this is his way back. So, on the 29th of January 1785, the jewelers give the cardinal the necklace. A courier then arrives, who claims to be from the queen. The cardinal gives the necklace to this courier.
What a fool that cardinal is, Tom, I mean,
do you think it's the courier, Dominic? No, who is it? Tell us who it is, surprise us.
It's one of Lamotte's lovers. Yeah, you astound me. And he goes away, he gives it to Lamotte's husband. So, that's very, very Marquis de Sade. So, the husband then breaks it up and he starts trying to fence the diamonds around Paris, but it's obviously dangerous to be doing it in Paris.
So, he then goes to London and starts doing it there. Meanwhile, of course, the jewelers are waiting for their money and the cardinal is waiting for signs of the queen's favour that he's been promised. And he goes to court and he's kind of waiting to see the queen with this lovely necklace. With the necklace, absolutely nothing. So, early July, he thinks, you know, I've got to see what's going on.
So, he sends Marie Antoinette a discreet note, kind of saying, very much looking forward to seeing these. Wink, wink, you know what I've got you, eh? Eh? Nudge, nudge. Oh, God.
And Marie Antoinette thinks he's mad and just disposes of the letter. Yeah, of course. And then, early in August, the jewelers are so desperate, because they're now facing bankruptcy, that they go to one of Marie Antoinette's ladies-in-waiting and say, look, where's this money that the queen promised us? And they go to the queen. You know, she's got no idea that any of this has been going on.
And Marie Antoinette leads the investigation personally. Understandably, she's appalled. I mean, she's completely innocent. and yet her good name has been consistently abused throughout the entire affair. And she has this kind of dramatic declaration of purpose.
Hideous vices must be unmasked. The purple of a cardinal and the title of a prince have cloaked a money grabber, a fraudster who dares to compromise. the wife of his sovereign. France and all of Europe shall know of it. And so she goes to the king and the king issues orders that the cardinal be arrested.
And so he is on the 15th of August and he is arrested while he's holding mass to celebrate the ascension of the Virgin in the chapel at Versailles. He's in his full robes, you know, smoke, bells, the works. In. come the king's guards. He's arrested and taken.
off to the Bastille. Crikey, Tom. What a story this is. So listen, everybody, come back after the break to find out what happens next.
Welcome back to The Rest is History. Napoleon Bonaparte, in later life, said that the death of Marie Antoinette began at the trial of the diamond necklace conspirators. And Tom, that's a big claim. Who am I to argue with Napoleon? He was there.
Now, why would one say that of something that, on the surface, seems a little bit inconsequential? And, of course, in which the queen is not really involved. Right. I mean, I guess, if people said,
well, of course, French Revolution, a scandal about a necklace would be low down the list. Very low down the list. Yeah. You've got bread riots, fiscal incompetence, all kinds of things, which we will be looking at in due course. But I think that the answer to why it is so damaging to the queen is the way that the scandal comes to be teased out and the way that it goes public.
Yeah. So what happens is that all the main participants in the scandal, so the Cardinal, Nicole, aka the Baron d'Oliva, the Comte de Cagliostro, and, of course, Delamotte, they're all arrested and they're all brought to trial. And the trials that they have are open. So the proceedings can be reported. And so the queen had said, all of France and Europe shall hear of this.
This is exactly what happens, but it doesn't work to her advantage. Well, just on that. So the.
openness, I think it's important that people get a sense of just what an enormous appetite for news and gossip there is in Paris, in particular, in the 1780s. So we mentioned earlier Robert Darnton's brilliant book, The Revolutionary Temper. And he talks in that about how all the different lawyers, we mentioned this to him in the first half time, that the different lawyers of the various participants publish these, what they call these memoirs of the case while the case is going on. And these would go through multiple editions and they would sell tens of thousands of copies and people would literally read them out in cafes and people would gather to read them together. It's a kind of collective experience of the news and a rumor and gossip.
And this case is the perfect story for all that. And it actually ties together all these anxieties and sort of fantasies about Marie Antoinette that have been gathering pace for more than a.
decade. The closest parallel I can think of from modern times would be the way in which the failure of the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana kind of exploded. There was gossip about it. There were whisperings about it. There was talk about it.
And then suddenly it was all brought out into the open and there was this absolute kind of firestorm of obsession. And I think that that is basically what happens. And it's devastating for Marie Antoinette and for the Crown generally, because all the protagonists, in various ways, come to be exonerated. Three of them are legally exonerated. Four of them are kind of basically exonerated before the bar of public opinion.
And so the Crown is left completely baffled and perplexed and wounded by this. So to go through the various, you know, the participants in these trials, three of them, all of whom have been sent to the Bastille and to be sent to the Bastille in this period, you know, to go to the Bastille, the Bastille is the symbol of royal oppression. So it kind of immediately makes them heroes, people instinctively on their side. So the Cardinal, when he goes to the Bastille, he is improbably cast as a kind of victim of royal oppression. He becomes the people's Cardinal.
But the thing is,
Simon Schama says in Citizens, he actually moved into a specially furnished apartment outside the prison where he spent nine months entertaining a stream of distinguished visitors. Oysters and champagne were laid on as a collation for guests and the Cardinal was allowed choice, works from his library and a retinue of servants to help him overcome the hardships of incarceration. But the.
image is that they're, you know, dripping water and clanking chains and rats and straw and everything, but it's not at all like that. And he says that he doesn't want the King to try it, basically because he doesn't trust the King. And so he says he wants to go to the Parlement de Paris. and the Parlement isn't, it's not a parliament, it's kind of like the High Court. So he goes on court.
there, it's open and his lawyer presents him, as, you know, a kind of Rousseau-esque figure, a figure who has an excess of candour. He's at one with nature. He's not suited to the machinations of a corrupt and decadent court. He's mother nature's child, all that kind of thing. And also, you know, he just wanted to serve the Queen.
It was his chivalrous duty. He's been made a fool of.
in this story, but he's not a conspirator. I mean, he's not a criminal. No. So there is a measure of.
truth there. They were right to acquit him. Yeah. And so he does get acquitted, but the implications of this are devastating for Marie Antoinette, and Jonathan Beckman spells it out. Louis and Marie Antoinette could scarcely believe that the Parlement had, in effect, ruled that the Queen could be mistaken for the kind of woman who might arrange a midnight assignation by a ruinously expensive necklace without her husband's permission and correspond.
in secret with a known roué. Right. Because if you're assuming that he could be easily fooled, then you're assuming that the possibility exists that she could have behaved like this. You and I know, and everybody who's read the books on her knows, that she would never have behaved like this, but the French public have been primed to think that she might.
Yeah, absolutely. And he retires to Strasbourg, where he's greeted as a kind of, you know, an oppressed innocent. So that's him. Nicole, the Baron d'Oliver, the account that we gave, as we said, that's basically derives from the lawyer that she has, who essentially casts her as the kind of heroine of a novel. And if it sounded like a novel, then I think, you know, there may be kind of element of that.
But I think the basic outline of what happened is true, but clearly it's been kind of slightly enhanced. I mean, she is a victim of it, really. She's.
been made a tool. She'd been made a dupe of. Yes. And what makes people even more sympathetic is.
that in the Bastille, she's given birth to a baby, you know, so that makes her even more of a kind of sentimental heroine of a Rousseau novel. So the Comte de Cagliostro. He's a great character. In the Bastille, he continues to play the part of the Magus, the man who is 3,000 years old. There's this brilliant detail.
in his interrogation in the Bastille. He's asked, do you have any regrets about the life that you've led? And Cagliostro replies, yeah, I feel terrible about the assassination of Pompey the Great and my role in that. Pompey the Great, you know, the great rival of Julius Caesar, had been killed 2,000 years before. So that's brilliant.
But once he gets to his trial, he immediately switches around and suddenly casts himself as a kind of cool Enlightenment sceptic. And he gets asked by the prosecution lawyer, why do you say that you're thousands of years old? And he says, I'm not. I'm.
37.. Yeah. So a lot of the stories about Cagliostro, to be fair, come from like pamphlets about him rather than things himself. So the Pompey, the Great story, I mean, he probably either said it as a joke or didn't say it. Yeah.
Anyway, he's a good character. I like him. And actually, the government accounts, which was by Barrister Cartaget, he wrote a memoir and it was the sort of government approved. one, basically said Cagliostro had nothing to do with this at all. He was like dragged in as window dressing.
But he was apparently in Lyon when the whole thing was.
taking place anyway. Difficult to know because he's such a fraud. No, that's true. I don't think you could trust anything that he says. So it's difficult to know.
But I mean, he gets off. People agree that he doesn't have anything to do with it. As for Jeanne de Lamotte, the confidence trickster, she is convicted. The evidence against her is overwhelming. I mean, she's basically bang to right.
But amazingly, even she wins public sympathy. Essentially, her defense is that everything that she said was true, that Marie Antoinette was guilty, that she had wanted the necklace, that she had written loads of letters, that she was in Versailles. So she gets sentenced to life imprisonment in the Sol Petriere. It's a kind of former munitions factory, isn't it? That is notorious as the place where prostitutes get sent.
It's basically a prostitute's prison. Yeah. So she gets taken there and she hasn't been told, before the sentence is read to her, what she's going to suffer. So she's taken to the prison. It's read out to her.
She's told that she's going to be birched, branded and be imprisoned for life. And she goes absolutely ballistic. She starts kind of scratching and writhing. She bites a chunk out of the executioner. She kind of swallows his flesh, so it is said.
And she's pinned down and the branding iron has V on it for voleurs, for thief. One of the brands is successfully imprinted, but the other one, she's twisting so much that it burns her breast and this kind of stench of roasting meat. So very, very horrible. And she's then taken inside. She's given a kind of pudding bowl.
So all her hair is chopped off. And then she is put into a rough gray Hessian dress and locked up. And amazingly, in 1787, so only a couple of years later, she escapes. And immediately it's assumed that this is all part of conspiracy, that the Queen wants her out of the way. And there may be an element of the fact.
I mean, I don't know. Maybe it's possible. Who knows? Anyway, she gets to London. And when she's there, she writes this venomously slanderous attack on the Queen.
She claims to have had a sapphic relationship with Marie Antoinette. She describes midnight assignations with the Queen. Heavens, I found her so beautiful. I said to myself, it is the goddess flora toying with a humble little flower. So the idea of Marie Antoinette as predatory, as domineering.
Yeah. Has groomed her.
Has groomed her. Yes, exactly. And Chantal Thomas says of her, she was the Justine of the pre-revolutionary epic. And Justine is the heroine of the Marquis de Sade's most famous novel. And the Justine is impeccably virtuous.
And because she is virtuous, she is persecuted by the kind of Sardean monsters, the aristocrats. And essentially, if she is the Justine, then Marie Antoinette is a kind of Sardean monster.
Simon Schama says she represented herself as an orphan of an older France, a heroine from the sticks, an innocent gone astray. That's the same point, isn't it? She's an innocent, rather like Nicole, the person who she is actually corrupted, ironically. But in this case, she has been corrupted personally by Marie Antoinette. And of course, that may seem completely bonkers, because we know, as you discussed so brilliantly in the last episode, Tom, that Marie Antoinette is actually quite, she's not puritanical, but she's very bourgeois.
I don't think she's bourgeois. Her sexual morality is bourgeois, Tom.
She's a combination. I mean, she's Catholic and she's Rousseauian. Okay. She's a combination of kind of old school Catholic morality, combined with a kind of girlish giddiness.
Fair enough. But what she isn't, she is not a predatory.
No, she's not.
Lesbian sort of groomer of little girls or young women, or whatever this woman is claiming.
But the problem is that these are portrayals of her that have already gained traction, that she's a monster of extravagance and that she's a kind of predatory whore. And the reason this scandal is so devastating is both that it amplifies those stories and that it makes them kind of very, very public. And so, in the wake of it, the portrayal of her as a kind of monstrous nymphomaniac is completely turbocharged. So by 1789, and we all know what happens in 1789, a pamphlet is published, which describes her sexual record, nobility, clergy, third estate. This is the backdrop to the meeting of the three estates, which we'll be doing in due course.
So it's obviously inspired by it. Any man has a right to her favours. The most handsome and robust are the most welcome guards, lackeys, actors, height of appropriate. Oh, indelible, shame. So kind of loving it.
And it's not just the queen who gets caught up on this. So also does her female favourites. So this is when the stories about the Duchess de Polignac, who we talked about yesterday, one of her squad, they get vituperative as well. Duchess de Polignac is relatively harmless. So is the Princess de Lambert.
But they are both cast as kind of co-vampires in Marie Antoinette's nymphomaniac coven.
Queens of vice, Tom.
Queens of vice. And what's fascinating is that, in the wake of the punishment of Delamotte, you start to get fantasies in which Marie Antoinette and her favourites suffer similar punishments. So a lampoon is published against the Duchess de Polignac. And it kind of says, let's see her humiliated. Let's see her punished.
Let's see her suffer before the gaze of the people. Yes, madame, you must do penance. And as the choice is up to the confessor, here is the penance I impose in the name of the nation. Shave your head. Don a grey hessian dress as your only adornment.
And go to the august assembly of the Estates General in this garb to make atonement and deliver up any remains of your plundering. So it's kind of working with the punishments of convicted prostitutes.
And also the Austrian-ness is really important here, isn't it? Because there are two claims additional to this. One that's very common is that she actually, her first victim, as it were, or the first person who perhaps groomed her, was her own brother, the Austrian Emperor Joseph II.
Yeah. So the Mozart thing, he's the too many notes king in Amadeus.
Yeah, yes, he is. Yeah. But then the other thing is, of course, that if she is Austrian, she's not French and she must therefore be a traitor. Yeah. And the more that the international temperature kind of rises, especially once the revolution has got going, the more people say, you know, she is not merely sexually kind of depraved.
She is politically depraved. And, you know, in the course of her sapphic lusts, she is absorbing secrets and passing on secrets to France's enemies.
Exactly so. And there's a sense that Maria Theresa, her mother, has sent her to infect France with her villainy. Yeah. So you may wonder, well, how on earth does Marie Antoinette cope with all this abuse? And the truth is that she treats it all with kind of a muse disdain.
So as early as 1775, she wrote to Maria Theresa, her mother, saying, we're in the middle of a satirical song epidemic. They have made some up about everyone at court, men and women alike. French license has even extended to the king. I myself have not been spared. Although this country is fond enough of malice, the songs are so flat and in such bad taste that they are successful neither with the public nor high society.
So two things there. One, she's only 20 years old when she says that. So I always find the stuff about Marie Antoinette unbelievably repulsive.
It's awful.
I mean, I just think. how anybody can take the side of the pamphleteers and not of the basically girl stroke young woman at the center of them is beyond me. But the other interesting thing is that she is quite wrong about that. So when she says successful, neither with the public nor high society, she is dead wrong. They are enormously successful and people do start to believe it.
Yeah. And so Chantal Thomas in her wonderful book about the pamphlets and Marie Antoinette's relationship to them. I mean, she basically says that one of the reasons perhaps why they don't impinge on Marie Antoinette is that she simply doesn't understand the power of the written word.
Because she doesn't read.
She doesn't really read. And she says Marie Antoinette had nothing to learn from the outside world. The hot headed, vehement words of the pamphlets were incomprehensible to her and so failed to touch her. But there are expressions of public hostility that do have an impact. So in May 1785, and this is when the scandal is kind of really building up, she goes into Paris and the people there refuse to cheer her.
And two years later, she's being booed and hissed on the streets of Paris.
Well, Tom, you say that, but actually, Theo, our producer would tell you that people aren't booing and hissing. They are shouting out, ooh, ooh, and gee, gee, gee. That's the equivalent of hissing. Yeah.
That's French for boo. Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, one of the chiefs of police in Paris writes to the king at Versailles and says that the queen shouldn't go into the capital. It's unsafe for her.
And so Louis XVI passes this on to his wife and forbids her to go to Paris. And, you know, Marie Antoinette is deeply, deeply wounded by this. And so she cancels her public engagements in the capital. And she basically retreats to the Petit Trianon, which, of course, then only makes the stories, you know, what's she up to in there with all her, you know, her girlfriends.
Exactly. That's the tragedy of it, right? The irony is, of course, she cannot win. She's in a position now where whatever she does will be seen as evidence of guilt. So, ironically, the fact that she tried to be less formal than the court is seen.
as, you know, she's not a good queen. The fact that she's got her group of friends, she's a lesbian. The fact that she's not going into the city because she's being booed, that shows she's arrogant and she doesn't care about the people and a traitor. You know, she cannot win. Yeah.
I feel really sorry for her.
And so you may wonder, well, does this matter? You know, does any of this matter? It's just surface froth. It does matter because it doesn't just damage the queen. The whole scandal of the diamond necklace has also seriously, for the first time, damaged the public reputation of the king.
You know, again, there have been kind of rumours bubbling under the surface. But again, it is this trial that brings slanders against the king to the surface. And there are two things that they focus. The first is that he is cast as a despot. You know, he is the man who has sent all these people to the Bastille.
He's a monster. He's an autocrat. Yeah. Who doesn't respect the liberty of the people.
And, as we'll see next time, that has enormous traction because of the political and financial crisis that France finds itself in. It does.
Absolutely. And the tragedy is, is that in a way, the king has kind of absorbed some of the lessons. So his treatment of Beaumarchais, who has written a preface to one of his plays that the king interprets as being an attack on him, he orders Beaumarchais to be arrested. But this time, he doesn't send him to the Bastille. He sends him to a prison called the Saint-Lazare, which is a correction centre for delinquent boys.
Where they're taught the error of their ways and kind of given the birch and things like that. And everyone finds this hilarious. And so Beaumarchais, who had always had laughter on his side, now finds that the laughter is against him. And basically his reputation is destroyed by it. So it suggests the king is kind of learning how to play the game.
The king, by the way, it's not a despot. I mean, that's one thing that's really worth stressing. There are many things that Louis XVI gets wrong. But being too bloodthirsty, too repressive, is definitely, I don't think there's any historian who would think that was one of them.
If he'd been a real despot, the Cardinal de Roja would have vanished and wouldn't have been sitting in his chambers having kind of capons. Yeah. But the other thing that this plays into is the idea of the king as sexually inadequate and, more specifically now, a cookhold. Because if Marie Antoinette is cast as being this kind of voracious nymphomaniac, there is this sense that her powers are being drawn from the sexually inadequacies of the king. And so you get all these rhymes about the size and the...
Rigidity or otherwise.
The flaccidity of the royal member. Yeah. And in the kind of the account of the queen and the affair that Delamotte writes in London, she says that the cardinal and the queen had been having an affair and that they had been engaged in a conspiracy to make the cardinal the prime minister of France and to subject France to the dominance of Austria. And so the king is somehow seen as being complicit in this. And so the king and queen of France, the emblems of the greatness of the country, are being cast as agents of an enemy power.
Well, Robert Danton in his book, The Revolutionary Temper, quotes a bookseller at the height of the diamond necklace affair who wrote in his journal or to his brother, I can't remember which, but he wrote, the public spirit has turned against him because he inspires no respect, no fear, no confidence. And he throws away the public's money for all sorts of follies. You know, that is the lesson that if you are a slightly gullible reader of these pamphlets, these propagandistic kind of pornographic fantasies, that's what you think about the king that, as Danton says, he's well-meaning, but stupid, bewildered, incompetent, timid, indecisive, constantly drunk, unfit even to govern a German principality.
Yeah, absolutely. And Danton is brilliant on why this matters, because essentially it's also going with the grain of the crisis that France itself is confronting. That this is a time where the state is running out of money and where people are starting to go hungry. There've been a succession of terrible harvests and all this kind of stuff about diamond necklaces and cook holding and cardinals and all kinds of stuff. It does actually matter, because it gives colour and venom to what otherwise might be kind of the sense of inchoate forces that are going wrong.
And so I think important just to emphasise at this point, as we approach the fateful year 1789, that this is not about republicanism. Again, so much of this is coming from within the court. So it's coming from the Duke de Provence, the king's young brother. It's also coming from the Duke of Orléans, the Duc d'Orléans, who is, after the three royal brothers, the most significant peer of the realm, who has a whole area of Paris, that is, his private fiefdom.
You know, the Palais-Royal.
The Palais-Royal. And so he's basically said anyone can publish what they like there. And so it's become a hotbed of all these kind of pamphlets and stuff. So it absolutely doesn't imply republicanism, but it's kind of like the signs of an immunity system going down. And it matters because basically the whole body politics seems diseased.
And, Dominic, I think in the next two episodes, we're going to explore beyond the flower gardens of Versailles, exactly how these diseases are kind of manifesting themselves in Paris and in the countryside.
So we'll be looking at the crisis that France finds itself in, in the 1780s. The crisis that leads to the calling of the States General and the beginning of the revolution. So there'll be a bit of finance. There'll be a lot of politics. There'll be a lot of famine.
There'll be all of this kind of stuff.
Tennis courts.
There'll be tennis courts. Of course, we're getting to the tennis court oath. And then, of course, to the fall of the Bastille. Very exciting. So if you want to listen to that now and you remember, the rest is history club, you can, of course, if you're not and you would like to join, then just go to therestishistory.com and you can sign up and you'll get all the episodes in this series right away.
Very excitingly. But, Tom, for those people who are not about to continue the journey, all we can say is
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