article

From Riches To Rags

AUG 1, 2012

The Spectacularly Public Life of Marie Antoinette
By Eli Keehn

First things first: she never said it. “Let them eat cake,” as a phrase, existed long before Marie Antoinette became France’s most celebrated and controversial queen. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was attributed to essentially any princess who appeared aloof from the poor—which was every princess. Marie led a decadent and pampered lifestyle, but she was ultimately more clueless than cruel. Her existence was comfortable, controlled, isolated, and carefully managed—until, all of a sudden, it wasn’t anymore.

Marie was born in 1755, a daughter of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa—the fifteenth of sixteen children, eleven of them girls. The Empress, probably the most powerful woman in Europe, spun a series of complex political alliances and cemented those alliances with promises of marriage. Her daughters were tools, sharpened by governesses and teachers of courtly arts so that they could be shipped to Europe’s various kings and dukes as living links between the Austrian Empire and its allies. Thus, from her very early childhood Marie’s persona and behavior were carefully crafted—she took especially well to dancing and singing, but was resistant to reading and writing, and her governesses tended to finish her homework for her. She was, in fact, notoriously poor at French, the language of European politics and aristocracy.

Throughout the 1760s Marie’s sisters either died of smallpox or were married off, and she became, essentially by default, her mother’s choice to marry the French heir to the throne, the Dauphin, Louis Auguste. Painstaking negotiations preceded the marriage agreement; the two sides settled on a dowry of 200,000 florins (roughly $3.6 million today), but the French court notably insisted that Marie undergo oral surgeries to correct her unacceptably crooked teeth. The very idea of the future French king marrying an Austrian aroused considerable suspicions in France, as Austria and France shared little more than a mutual enmity towards Prussia. Maria Theresa eventually wore down the opposition, and in May 1770, her youngest
daughter was handed over to the French court on a neutral island in the middle of the Rhine River, symbolically removing her Austrian clothing and donning the elaborate dress of Versailles. Marie was fifteen years old and would never see her mother again.

But Maria Theresa’s influence over her daughter’s behavior did not diminish with distance. Marie arrived at court with a set of highly specific instructions from the Empress, including a detailed breakdown of her morning routine:

When you wake up, you will immediately upon arising go through your morning prayers on your knees and read some religious text, even if it is only for six or seven minutes, without concerning yourself about anything else or speaking to anyone…. You must be very strict about this, for it depends on you alone, and your temporal and spiritual happiness may depend upon it.

The Empress informed the new Dauphine that the whole set of instructions (known as the règlements, or “rules”) were to be reread once a month. Maria Theresa supplemented the information she received from Marie’s regular letters with secret reports about her behavior that were sent by the Austrian Minister to France.

Courtly life at Versailles was spectacularly, almost unimaginably, public. Anybody appropriately dressed was welcome to watch the royals eat dinner; men required swords for entry, but these could be borrowed at the palace gates by anyone who forgot his at home. Even more ostensibly private routines, like the daily toilette (morning preparations), were elaborate rituals necessitating a vast array of servants. Marie could not put on her underwear without an audience; indeed, she could not put it on at all without a courtier first presenting it to her. “I put on my rouge and wash my hands in front of the whole world,” she wrote to her mother in 1773.

Marie was officially presented to the French public in 1773, three years after her marriage to Louis, in a festive ceremony in Paris. She immediately entranced the crowds; when it was time to return to Versailles, the crush of nearly 200,000 onlookers paralyzed her for an hour. “What touched me the most,” she wrote her mother, was “the tenderness and eagerness of the poor people, who, in spite of the taxes which oppress them, were carried away with joy on seeing us…. How lucky we are, in our position, to win the friendship of an entire people so cheaply.” The friendship she described would soon turn, shockingly and inexorably, into virulent mistrust.

The death of Louis XV in 1774 elevated the Dauphin to the throne; he became Louis XVI, and Marie fully assumed the role of the queen. She was not initially interested in political power, and contentedly planned and carried out endless decorations and redecorations of her personal palace, the Petit Trianon. A relatively small chateau on the grounds of Versailles built during the reign of Louis’ father, Trianon became Marie’s intimate escape from the taxing formalities of courtly life. She became a fashion icon, starting the trend of the “pouf”—a towering mass of hair extravagantly decorated with miniature objects. Her chief pleasure was gambling, on one occasion playing for three straight days leading up to her 21st birthday. Her behavior did not cause the enormous French debt which was itself the principal factor in revolution—the costs of various wars, including the support of the American rebellion in the late 1770s, must shoulder the majority of the blame for that—but nonetheless the French public began to sour on her. Largely due to the royal couple’s difficulty conceiving an heir, libelous and pornographic pamphlets began to appear in the streets of Paris. The Marie of the pamphlets possessed a voracious sexual appetite, which her husband could not satisfy, driving her to seek pleasure from hundreds of male and female courtiers and attendants. Throughout the 1780s, as the French financial situation deteriorated and increasingly exorbitant taxes were levied, public opinion towards the monarchy and towards Marie in particular continued to degenerate. Upon her arrival in France, she had been called with some affection L’Autrichienne, “The Austrian woman;” now the nickname devolved into L’autre-chienne, “the other bitch”—the word other pointing to Marie’s status as an outsider in French society by nature of her foreign birth.

When things finally fell apart, they fell apart quickly. Parisian mobs stormed the Bastille in July 1789; in August the National Assembly introduced a constitution; in October a crowd attacked Versailles and forced the royal family to move to Paris, where they were placed under house arrest in the palace of the Tuileries. The King, the Queen, and their children would remain there for two years, until a hopelessly botched escape attempt in 1791, dramatized in David Adjmi’s play, allowed the revolutionaries to begin the process of dismantling the monarchy in earnest. Louis clung to his title until September 1792, and in December of that year was put on trial for treason. He was beheaded in January 1793.

Throughout this terrifying, vertiginous four-year period, Marie was essentially helpless; she never seemed to grasp completely the gravity of the situation, writing to a friend after the failed escape that, “We are in view of our guards day and night; I’m indifferent to it…Be calm, nothing will happen to me.” But once Louis had been disposed of, there was no hope for her. She was given a two-day trial, at which she was accused, among much else, of secretly funneling money to Austria and of having an incestuous relationship with her son—behaviors directly lifted from the defamatory pamphlets which had been circulating for a decade. In October 1793, the crowds which had met her with adoration twenty years earlier now gathered to witness her public beheading. Her last words were, “I did not do it on purpose.” She was not speaking of her role, however large or small it was, in the downfall of the extraordinarily privileged monarchical system in which she had participated essentially since birth. Rather, she was speaking to her executioner; upon mounting the guillotine platform, she’d accidentally stepped on his foot.

Le Hameau de la Reine