Marie Antoinette - free ebook by Hilaire Belloc

MARIE ANTOINETTE

THE LAST ACT OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY Order given on 10th August, 1792, to the Guard at the Tuileries to Cease Fire and return to Barracks On the authenticity of this document see Appendix C...

1 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER I THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION

EUROPE, which carries the fate of the whole world, lives by a life which is in contrast to that of every other region, because that life, though intense, is inexhaustible. There is present, therefore, in her united history a dual function of maintenance and of change such as can be discovered neither in any one of her component parts nor in civilisations exterior to her own. Europe alone of all human groups is capable of transforming herself ceaselessly, not by the copying of foreign models, but

28 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER II BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD

ALL that summer of 1755 the intrigue—and its success—proceeded. I have said that the design of Kaunitz was not so much to impose upon his time a new plan as to further a climax to which that time was tending. Accidents in Europe, in America, and upon the high seas conspired to mature the alliance. Fighting broke out between the French and English outposts in the backwoods of the colonies. Two French ships had been engaged in a fog off the banks and captured; later, a sharp panic had led the Cabi

26 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER III THE ESPOUSALS

THE fortnightly despatches from France customarily arrived at Vienna together in one bag and in the charge of one courier. The Empress would receive at once the letters of Mercy, the official correspondence, perhaps the note of a friend, and the very rare communications of royalty. In this same batch which brought that decisive letter of Louis XV. to her son, on the same day, therefore, in which she was first secure in her daughter’s future, there also arrived the usual secret report from Mercy.

23 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER IV THE DU BARRY

THE presence of the Du Barry at the Court of Versailles, the fact that this presence preceded the Austrian child’s arrival, that it was first publicly admitted at the first public appearance of the Dauphiness, and that the four years of her tutelage were overshadowed by the new Royal Mistress was the initial and irretrievable disaster of Marie Antoinette’s life. It moulded her view of the nation and of the family with whom she had now to mingle; it deeply affected the populace she was to attempt

13 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER V THE DAUPHINE

WHEN the mock-marriage was over and the night passed, and when, with the Thursday morning, the long routine that was to be her life opened upon her, the child could watch with less excitement and with less illusion the nature of that new world. Her vivacity was not diminished, but her spirit immediately adopted a permanent attitude of astonished observation towards emotions and conventions whose general scheme she could not grasp at all. Daily the incidents which passed before her while they vio

38 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER VI THE THREE YEARS

FROM the death of Louis XV. to the close of the summer of 1777 is a period of somewhat over three years. In those three years the fates of the French monarchy and of the Queen were decided. For though no great catastrophe marked them nor even any considerable fruit of policy, and though an onlooker would have said no more than that something a little disappointing had, in the process of these years, chilled the first enthusiasm for the new reign, yet we can to-day discover within their limits mo

40 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER VII THE CHILDREN

THE expectation of an heir, the Queen’s ascendency over her husband, the promise of adventurous war, proceeded with the year. Meanwhile the little business of Bavaria somewhat marred the hopes of the now renewed and invigorated Monarchy. It is a business history should make little of; hardly a combat—rather a diplomatic rupture soon arranged. It covered the year exactly—it was settled with the close of it; but it had its significance in the Queen’s life, for her political action in it confirmed

25 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER VIII FIGARO

THE birth of an heir struck, as it seemed, an epoch in the evident transformation of the Monarchy and in the increasing position which Marie Antoinette occupied upon that scene; not that such a birth was either unexpected or unlikely. The Court and the nation had known for now three years that the royal family was established; it was certain that children would now support and surround the throne, and even in the preceding year nothing but a natural accident had postponed the hope of a prince. B

42 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER IX THE DIAMOND NECKLACE

AS the summer of 1784 broadened through May and June it led on the Queen to every grace of life, and at last, as it might have been imagined, to security. The season itself was fruitful and serene: the establishment of prestige abroad—so often a forerunner of evil to European nations—was now triumphantly achieved. There was now about the Court an air of solidity and permanence which the visit of foreign princes continued to confirm, and this air (thanks to Calonne’s largesse) seemed less poisone

30 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER X THE NOTABLES

FOR the Queen the decision to send the Cardinal to trial was a final action. The thing was done—and, for that matter, nearly done with. When she could find time in an interval of her occupations to write to her brother Joseph—it was not till a fortnight later—the whole letter, though it dealt in detail with the affair as one deserving a full explanation, was written upon a tone of relief. It was tuned all of it to one key-phrase: “I am delighted to think that we shall never hear of this filthy b

40 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XI THE BASTILLE

THE decision was taken. France was alive with the advent of the States-General. The autumn of 1788 had come. Fersen was with the Queen. It was more than fourteen years since, a boy of eighteen, Northern, dignified, and grave, his large and steady brown eyes had met hers from far off among the hundreds in the Masked Ball at the Opera. He was then a child. She also was a child, pure, exiled, of an active timidity, and not yet even Queen. I have written what happened then: the rare occasions on whi

36 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XII OCTOBER

ON the 23rd of September the Regiment of Flanders marched into Versailles. To seize all that follows two things must be clearly fixed: first, that the Queen was now separate from all the life around her; secondly, that the accidents of the next fortnight determined all that remained of her life. The Revolution, now organised, possessed of regular authorities and of a clear theory, was in action, moving with the rapidity of some French campaign towards clean victory, or, upon an error or a check,

47 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XIII MIRABEAU

THERE existed in France at that moment one force which, in alliance with the Government, could have preserved the continuity of institutions, among other institutions of the Throne. That force resided in the personality of Mirabeau. Had he survived and so succeeded—for his failure was only possible with death—the French nation might indeed have preserved all its forms and would then have lost its principle and power. It might have been transformed into something of lower vigour than itself, it m

39 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XIV VARENNES

IT was no longer night; it was near day, the brightening air smelt of morning. The links of the harness-chains clattered a little as the relay horses were hacked against the pole of the big carriage. Fersen sauntered to the carriage window of that side upon which the Queen sat. He called out loudly her supposed mistress’s assumed name, “Madame Korff,” saluted her and turned to go on his lonely cross-country ride to Bourget and the Brussels road, by which he also purposed to fly. But, even as he

44 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XV THE WAR

A MAN, callous or wearied by study, might still discover in the pursuit of History one last delight: the presence in all its record of a superhuman irony. In Padua, where the Polignacs had taken refuge with their loot, the Emperor Leopold, returning from Tuscany, was at that moment their host and guest. With them and their circle he discussed the enormities of the French and the approaching escape of his sister and the King; for he was cognisant of their plan: he knew that since the death of Mir

26 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XVI THE FALL OF THE PALACE

THE noisy, good-natured, and very dangerous mob had gone at last; their final stragglers, gazing, curious and tired, at the pictures and the gilding (the trappings of their Public King in his great Public Palace), had wandered out. A few steps on the wide stone stairs of the central pavilion were still heard lazily descending. The dishevelled family was at rest. A little group of Deputies remained behind, and talked in low and careful voices to the King and Queen—principally to the Queen, for sh

29 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XVII THE TEMPLE

THE vanguard of the mob came pouring in. They swarmed through the arches under the Long Gallery, and the main body of them still came swinging up to it along the river-side. The sun, well up and brazen, touched the metal about them and sent dancing gleams from pikes and curved hooks bound to staves. Before that uneven crowd the long shadows of morning stood out sharply, thrown along the uneven paving of the narrow quays. They sang or jested; they jostled and could not order themselves. There wer

35 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XVIII THE HOSTAGE

THAT night the prisoners in the Tower did not sleep, saving the little Dauphin: he slept soundly; and it is said of his mother that, watching him, she murmured that he was of the age at which his brother had died, at Meudon, and that those of her family who died earliest were the most blessed. In the last silences of the January night, till past two in the morning, the woman Tison, who was in part their gaoleress and in part a spy upon them, heard them talking still, and when she came to them Ma

32 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XIX THE HUNGER OF MAUBEUGE

THE Queen descended from her carriage. She was weak but erect. The close heat of the night and her sleeplessness and her fatigue had caused great beads of sweat to stand upon her forehead. Up river along the quays there had already showed, as she crossed the bridge on to the Island of the Cité, a faint glimmer of dawn, but here in the courtyard of the prison all was still thick night. The gates of the Conciergerie opened rapidly and shut behind her. Her gaolers led the way down a long, low, and

21 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XX WATTIGNIES

Monday , the 14th of October:— The fate of the Queen and of the Republic had each come to a final and critical issue when the light broke, dully in either place, over Paris and over the pastures of the frontier. There the army lay to arms in the valley, with Coburg entrenched upon the ridge above them, and beyond him the last famine of Maubeuge: from dawn the French lines could hear, half a day’s march to the northward, the regular boom of the bombardment. But Carnot was now come. In Paris, when

35 minute read

Read Chapter

PREFACE TO APPENDICES

The practice of loading every page of a modern history with references to authority is charlatan. Such footnotes (as was lamentably evident, for instance, in Anatole France’s recent work upon Joan of Arc) are usually copied from earlier authorities, and are, for the greater part, added without any conscientious reference to the original. Moreover, in dealing with a subject which has been as thoroughly written out by innumerable scholars as has the life of Marie Antoinette, there are very few new

1 minute read

Read Chapter

APPENDIX A THE OPERATION ON LOUIS THE SIXTEENTH OF FRANCE

THE somewhat lengthy attempt to determine the exact date which changed the course of Louis XVI.’s life, to which I have been compelled in the text, would have been unnecessary had the document which proves both the operation itself and the moment of it been published. It is certain that Maria Theresa knew in the last year of the old King’s reign the nature of the trouble. [46] 46 . Maria Theresa to Mercy , 3rd January 1774 .—“Je ne compte presque plus que sur l’entremise de l’empereur, qui à s

5 minute read

Read Chapter

APPENDIX B ON THE EXACT TIME AND PLACE OF DROUET’S RIDE

THE reader or student acquainted with various records of the French Revolution may be tempted to regard the account of Drouet’s Ride in my text as containing too much detail for accurate history; especially as no historian has hitherto done more than vaguely allude to it. I will therefore in this Appendix show the way in which I found it possible to reproduce every circumstance of Drouet’s movements from the time when he left Ste. Menehould until the time of his arrival at Varennes. The berline

4 minute read

Read Chapter

APPENDIX C THE ORDER TO CEASE FIRE

THE order to cease fire, which forms the frontispiece of this book, and which is the last executive document of the French monarchy, has been misunderstood by not a few critics, and its value thereby lessened. It is, as I shall presently show, authentic, and therefore of the highest possible interest to every student of history. The traveller will find it to-day in the central glass case of the square Revolutionary Room in the Carnavalet Museum. The body of the writing is not in the hand of Loui

2 minute read

Read Chapter

APPENDIX D ON THE LOGE OF THE “LOGOTACHYGRAPHE”

THE Manège was pulled down after the consular decree of year XI., which originated the Rue de Rivoli; the historical reconstruction of its arrangements on the 10th of August 1792 is the more difficult from the fact that the only accurate plan of it which has come down to us [56] dates from a period earlier than December 1791, in which month (on the 27th) the order was given to change nearly the whole of its dispositions. The box of the Logographe can be fixed in this plan (though not in the new

1 minute read

Read Chapter

APPENDIX E UPON THE “LAST PORTRAIT OF THE QUEEN” BY KUCHARSKI

THREE “last” portraits of Marie Antoinette, each very similar to the two others, though not replicas, are known to exist: each is ascribed to the painter Kucharski, who appears for a moment at the Queen’s trial, and who is known to have painted her at Court. These portraits are, one in Arenburg Gallery at Brussels, another in the Carnavalet, and the third in the new Revolutionary Room on the third floor at Versailles. This last is the one which is reproduced here, because M. de Nolhac, by far th

1 minute read

Read Chapter

APPENDIX F ON THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE QUEEN’S LAST LETTER

THE few doubts that some have put forward against the authenticity of this famous document will, unless history abandons its modern vices, increase with time, for it is a document exactly suited to the type of minute, internal, literal, and documentary criticism by which tradition is, to-day, commonly assailed. It will be pointed out that the psychology of this letter differs altogether from that of the mass of Marie Antoinette’s little scribbled notes, and equally from her serious political dra

10 minute read

Read Chapter

APPENDIX G

THE cautious student will attach considerable importance to the account given by Dumas, and to the account given by the Abbé Gabriel, especially to the former, in his La Route de Varennes . Dumas was a novelist. His contribution to history will therefore seem suspect, but it must be remembered that he had the whole story from Choiseul himself. The motives to which he ascribes Choiseul’s departure are substantially those given in the text; but he particularly adds that the number of peasants crow

39 minute read

Read Chapter