The Lost King of France: The Tragic Story of Marie-Antoinette's Favourite Son. Deborah Cadbury
La Motte, who went to London post-haste to make her fortune as the gems emerged in brooches, ear-rings, snuff boxes and other trifles.
There was just the outstanding sum of 1.6 million livres. When the court jewellers demanded payment, the shocking scandal began to unravel. The king arrested the cardinal and he was sent to the Bastille, only to be tried and acquitted of theft later before a sympathetic parlement. There were cries of ‘Vive le cardinal!’ in the streets, expressing the people’s view that he was the foolish victim of a ‘tyrant’ king. Eventually brought to justice, Jeanne de La Motte was sent to the prison of La Salpêtrière and condemned to a public flogging. She was to be branded with a V for voleuse (‘thief’) on her shoulder. In front of a huge crowd, the iron rod slipped as she struggled and she was burned on the breast. She too successfully portrayed herself as victim in the ‘Diamond Necklace Affair’ in her memoirs, in which she claimed only to have confessed to the theft to protect the queen, with whom she had had an affair.
Although Marie-Antoinette was entirely innocent, as the unbelievable saga unfolded before the amazed public in the late 1780s, it was her reputation that became the most sullied. Her love of beautiful jewels had been widely reported. It was easy to believe that she had accepted the necklace, refused to pay for it and then spitefully passed the blame onto others. Under the relentless onslaught of outrageous libelles that poured onto the streets of Paris, her image became irrevocably tarnished. It was claimed that she and her favoured friends continued to spend recklessly and that she had handed over millions of livres to her Austrian family.
She was portrayed as the real power behind the throne who pushed Austrian interests on a weak king. The degree to which she was seen as out of touch with the realities of the poor came when she was attributed as saying ‘Let them eat cake’ when bread was in short supply. There is no evidence that she said this; the remark is more likely to have been made a century before, by Louis XIV’s queen. Yet the queen began to receive pointed demonstrations of disapproval when she ventured out in public. Trips into Paris could turn quickly into frightening undertakings.
With France teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and the king demanding yet more taxes, the queen began to emerge as the prime culprit. The ‘Austrian whore’ or ‘Austrian bitch’ was transformed into the root cause of the country’s financial plight. At a watershed in the destruction of her image she was dubbed the wildly extravagant ‘Madame Déficit’. Owing to her unpopularity, her latest portrait was not hung in the Royal Academy of Paris. In the blank frame remaining, someone had written: ‘Behold the Deficit!’
The once pleasure-loving queen retreated from public gaze. Occasional rides into the country around the Trianon with Count Axel Fersen were among the few consolations at a time when she was increasingly preoccupied with motherhood. In the summer of 1787 her fourth child, Sophie, born the year before, died suddenly from tuberculosis. As she struggled with this loss, it was becoming increasingly evident that the Dauphin, too, was showing signs of tuberculosis. He began to lose weight and suffered attacks of fever.
As the autumn and winter months wore on, the king was losing control of the political situation. Under continued financial pressure, Louis recalled the Parlement. However, the king’s insistence that he wanted a fairer system of taxation fell on deaf ears. He seemed unable to get his message across, and was even opposed by his own distant cousin, the scheming Philippe d’Orléans, head of the Orléanist line of the Bourbon family. It was becoming clear to Louis that the tax issue was being used as a pretext for a wider challenge to his authority as the king. A system of rule that had existed in France for generations was now at risk. At stake was not just balancing the budget and pushing through a fairer system of taxation, but more fundamentally who had the right to take these decisions and govern France. Determined to re-establish his authority, on 8 May 1788 Louis gambled yet again. He suspended not only the Parlement of Paris but also the other twelve provincial Parlements as well. This prompted a wave of rioting across France. There was an outpouring of support for the parlements and all sections of society seemed ranged against a king who was increasingly portrayed as a tyrant. Louis began to doubt his own ability and, according to his youngest sister, Madame Elisabeth, was racked with indecision. ‘My brother has such good intentions,’ she wrote, ‘but fears always to make a mistake. His first impulse over, he is tormented by the dread of doing an injustice.’ Both he and his finance minister became ill with the stress as the government’s financial position continued to deteriorate. Many people refused to pay any taxes at all until the king backed down. Loménie de Brienne, now unable to raise money either by credit or taxes, was obliged to print money to pay government staff. It was, in effect, an admission of bankruptcy. He was losing command of the situation and by August he was fired.
In the hope of bringing order to the disintegrating condition of the state, Louis came under increasing pressure to summon an ancient institution known as the Estates-General. This comprised elected representatives of three great medieval orders or estates: the clergy, the nobles and the commoners. The Estates-General was only summoned in times of crisis; Louis was only too aware that such a meeting might undermine his authority still further. The last time the Estates-General had sat, in 1614, they had only become a forum for disagreement and conflict. Yet the whole nation seemed to be demanding its recall. In late August, responding to popular demand, he reappointed his former finance minister, Jacques Necker. Lurching from one policy to another, increasingly unable to stave off bankruptcy, Louis became trapped. Finally, he agreed to summon the Estates-General to Versailles the following year. It was a desperate gamble.
When the Estates-General had last met 174 years previously, it had had an equal number of representatives from each estate, in which the First Estate, the clergy, and the Second Estate, the nobility, could always combine together to outvote the Third Estate, the commoners. When the restored parlement demanded the same arrangement this time, there was outrage and further riots. Louis decided to right this imbalance by giving the commoners as many representatives as the nobility and clergy together, but he neglected to say whether the voting would be by ‘order’ or by head. What had initially begun as a protest by the clergy and nobles against the powers of the king to raise their taxes had now set in motion a chain of events in which all sections in France sought to exert greater political power. Even the elements seemed ranged against Louis. A very bad harvest was followed in 1788 by a viciously cruel winter in which many of the poor died of cold or starvation. Unrest was growing; robber bands pillaged the countryside. To many ordinary people the whole system in France seemed rotten; feelings against the king and queen hardened as deeply felt grievances were aired.
As the debates raged about the Estates-General, Marie-Antoinette watched anxiously over the declining health of her eldest son. ‘The young Prince fell, in a few months, from rude health into a condition which curved his spine, distorted and lengthened his face, and rendered his legs so weak that he was unable to walk without being supported like some broken old man,’ wrote Madame Campan. Still only six years old, his little body slowly became pitifully deformed as his tuberculosis spread. ‘He has one leg shorter than the other, and his spine is twisted and sticks out unnaturally,’ the queen confided to her brother, Emperor Joseph II, in February 1788. The next month the Dauphin was sent to the Château de Meudon with his governor, in the hopes that his health would recover with the fresh country air. The king visited his son no less than forty times over the summer months, eagerly looking for any sign of improvement. There was none.
The queen took comfort from her other two children. Marie-Thérèse, the eldest, she nicknamed Mousseline la Sérieuse on account of her serious, thoughtful manner. The Petite Madame took after her father in temperament, although she could be dignified sometimes to the point of seeming haughty. The queen reserved her strongest endearments for her youngest, Louis-Charles: ‘mon chou d’amour’. His blue eyes and blond hair resembled his mother’s and with his affectionate and playful personality he proved a most rewarding child. He enjoyed games of ‘wedding’ in the nursery with his friends and playing with sand or horses – his great aunts had given him eight small black ponies, which had been specially trained so he could ride them. Madame Campan observed, ‘his ruddy health and loveliness did, in truth, form a striking contrast to the languid look and melancholy disposition of his elder brother’. Increasingly the king and queen’s hopes for the future of