The Queen's Necklace

Chapter Ten. The Bastille, the Parlement and the King

To M de Launay,

I write to request that you receive my cousin the Cardinal Rohan into my fortress known as the Bastille, and hold him there pending my further instructions, for which I beg thanks for your assistance.

Louis, Baron Breteuil

Versailles, 16th August 1785

Such was the tenor of the royal arrest warrant, the lettre de cachet on whose authority, on the evening of 16th August, the Commander of the Bastille (the same de Launay who died when the building was stormed in 1789), and the Comte d’Agoult, Captain of the Guard, escorted Rohan by coach into the prison. He had spent the day at home, and had been seen in the great window of his salon playing with his pet ape: perhaps they were taking their leave of one another.

At dawn on 18th August, on the authority of a second lettre de cachet, Jeanne de la Motte was also detained. The summons served on her husband failed to reach him. He had in fact set out for Paris with the idea of defending his wife, but had second thoughts along the way, and took himself off to London instead.

The modern visitor to the Bastille finds only the spot where the old building stood, the circular Place with the lofty memorial column at its centre. The historic building was destroyed on that memorable quatorze juillet which has since become the National Day, since it marks the beginning of freedom not just for the French but for people all over the world.

The Bastille was originally a circular fortress. Later, when no longer used to defend the city, it became a prison, playing much the same role as the Tower in London. It was so hated that it came to be seen as the physical symbol of tyranny, thanks above all to the lettres de cachet, whose victims were for the most part imprisoned there — but not only there: every region had its own equivalent, where people were locked away in hospitals, madhouses and solitary cells.

The lettre de cachet, as we have noted, was a warrant for arrest. Its significance lay in that the King himself issued it, without needing to give any reason. The detained person did not appear before any court. He remained in prison until the King saw fit to set him free. “The Bastille,” wrote a contemporary, “is a place in which anyone, without regard to age, sex or social rank, might find himself, without having any idea why he is there, how long he might remain, or how he will ever get out.”

Everyone at the time knew that the police had special agents from whom, for large sums of money, one could buy lettres de cachet already prepared — you had only to fill in the name — and furthermore, that both in the Bastille and others of His Majesty’s prisons large numbers of people would languish for the rest of their miserable days simply because they had been arrested on the basis of one of these documents and then forgotten about. In 1784, a M Latude was released after thirtyfive years in prison. He had been locked away for planning an attack (involving a time bomb) on one of the Pompadours. And Malesherbes mentions one unfortunate who had gone blind, had been let out with no one to care for him, and promptly begged to be allowed back into the prison. The Bastille was not a comfortable place. Malesherbes once told Prime Minister Maurepas that he ought to show Louis XVI around it.

“I never have,” was the reply. “If I did, he’d never send anyone there again.”

In recent decades the intellectual life of France has been largely dominated by writers and historians of the royalist persuasion, who, partly by astute reasoning and partly through the sheer mass of data they have assembled, have established that the Ancien Régime was for the most part innocent of those crimes that the Revolution, and libertarian writers of the nineteenth century, ascribed to it. Among those prepared to judge on the basis of facts is Frantz Funck-Brentano, and it was he who went through the entire body of documents relating to the Bastille and came to the surprising conclusion that the lettre de cachet was generally not the cruel weapon of a tyrannical monarchy, but on the contrary, an outstandingly useful institution for the rest of society.

Its great advantage was that it enabled the prosecuting authorities to make rapid progress in situations where the slow and cumbersome nature of criminal proceedings might otherwise drag matters out for years. It could also be used to invoke the power of the monarchy to intervene in situations which did not fall within its normal jurisdiction. These were almost always family cases.

Lettres de cachet were often used by parents against their own children; for example, if the son were an impulsive and incorrigible gambler, he could be taught discipline by showing him that he might spend the rest of his life being arrested and charged — thus preserving the family from shame. Funck-Brentano generally saw the device as a way of defending traditional French family life. His idea was that the world order of the Ancien Régime was based on the power of, and respect for, the family, and that the main cause of its collapse was that that respect was undermined by the influence of eighteenth century philosophy. If, for example, a young aristocrat wished to marry a bourgeois girl and thus dishonour his family, there was a simple solution. On the basis of a lettre de cachet the young man or the girl would be locked away and kept a prisoner until there was a change of attitude. Events of that kind naturally did not cause much of a stir, unlike those occasions when a writer such as Voltaire or Beaumarchais was imprisoned for showing too much self-assurance in the eyes of his betters. But such examples, at least according to Funck-Brentano, were very isolated.

While we have every respect for Funck-Brentano, and the present work has so much to thank him for, and although we would not for a moment dare question the accuracy of his information, from a moral point of view we cannot agree with him. We give greater credence to the worthy Cagliostro, another of those who were unjustly imprisoned in the Bastille, who, following his release, declared in a pamphlet he wrote in England entitled Letter to the French People:

“You, the French people, have everything you need for happiness: a fertile land and a gentle climate; good hearts and a enchanting joie de vivre; you have both genius and grace, no equals in the art of pleasing, and no masters in the others. All you lack, my friends, is this one trifle: the right to sleep soundly in your beds while you remain innocent.”

Be that as it may, the French Revolution greatly enlarged our sense of the worth of the individual. However much we might try, few of us nowadays would consider it an offence that cried out to heaven if a young aristocrat wanted to marry a girl from the middle class, and as for any shame that might bring on the family name, we would simply mutter “tant pis”—so much the worse for the family name. While we are no stranger to historical relativism, and agree that every age must be judged by its own standards, we also take the view that under every sky (since it is always the same sky) freedom is better than servitude. And since it was the very first thing they did, it seems clear that the people of Paris felt they really had to demolish the Bastille, and none of the reasoning and statistics of the Funck-Brentanos of the time have ever persuaded them that they were not right to do so.

So, one by one, all the principal actors in our story are gathering in the Bastille. Jeanne arrived on 20th August, Cagliostro and his wife three days later, on the basis of a deposition she had made. Jeanne still felt she had nothing to fear. Very soon, using her juggler-and-monkey tricks, she had worked out a complete system of lies; Cagliostro would be shown to be capable of anything.

But it was to no avail. The truth was beginning to come out, and its instrument was none other than the good Father Loth, the Franciscan monk who acted as Jeanne’s chaplain and major domo. He had set his sights on the office of Preacher to the King, and was angling for an opportunity to speak in his presence one Whitsuntide. He had poured his heart out to Jeanne, and she had promised to have a word on his behalf with Rohan, who as Grand Almoner was head of the spiritual branch of the royal household. Rohan told Loth to show him the speech he would give, then passed it on to his deputy, the Abbé Georgel, who thought it simply inadequate. So Rohan, at Jeanne’s request, gave Loth a better one, so that he might perform more tolerably before the King.

It is possible that Father Loth had been serving the interests of the royal household all along; or perhaps he felt a stronger debt of gratitude to Rohan than he did to his patroness. But it was enough to make him call on the Abbé Georgel after the Cardinal had been arrested. Georgel was to Rohan what Mme Campan was to Marie-Antoinette, the indispensable confidant of French classic drama (we saw how Ducis felt he had to supply even Hamlet with one) — the person who listens to everything, but does nothing in his or her own right. Georgel plays the same role of reliable witness as Mme Campan, and he too has a moment when he both listens and acts, turning Loth’s disclosure to his master’s advantage.

Father Loth had compared Réteaux de Villette’s handwriting to that in the letters signed by “Marie-Antoinette de France”, and lo and behold, they were the same. He revealed that before she fled the house Jeanne had burnt the letters she claimed to have received from Rohan. He recalled the occasion when they took d’Oliva to Versailles; it had struck him then how closely she resembled Marie-Antoinette. He now suspected that the Comtesse had tricked a lot of money out of the Cardinal, and perhaps the necklace with it.

In his Memoirs, Georgel clearly sees Jeanne in the role of the Devil. But she is not the only one he blames for destroying Rohan: delicately and obliquely, he also accuses the Queen. His grounds for this are that when she received the letter from Boehmer she did not immediately insist that she knew nothing about it, or deny that she had ordered it or even received it. Georgel claims that she kept silent in order to implicate the hated Rohan even more deeply. Reading between the lines, he felt that the possibility could not be ruled out that Jeanne de la Motte was indeed working on her instructions, or at least, that she deceived the Cardinal with the Queen’s full knowledge.

“When I questioned Bassenge in Basle in 1797,” Georgel writes, “he did not deny but in fact formally acknowledged that statements he made during the trial, like the evidence submitted by Boehmer, sounded very much as if dictated by Breteuil, and that, if the two of them had not actually followed his orders blindly, they had, at the very least, been forced to remain silent about matters he did not want them to mention. After that revelation, how can one possibly exonerate Her Majesty of a degree of culpable connivance — which sits very ill with her own standards and her social rank? The dishonourable actions of the woman La Motte, abusing the Queen’s name in order to carry out her monumental theft with greater audacity and impunity, ought to have outraged any royal person. How could anyone not be shocked by it? If the Queen had acted on her initial feelings of insulted honour, it would almost certainly have prompted the jewellers to tread more carefully. But even if we accept that she did want to take revenge on the Cardinal and be rid of him, the fact remains that what had already happened, and what she already knew, were more than enough to force him to resign his position at the Court and return to his diocese. No one would have been able to challenge the justice of her actions; the Grand Almoner would have been properly humiliated for his credulity; the house of Rohan would have been disgraced, with no grounds for complaint against her; there would have been no scandal, no Bastille and no criminal proceedings. And that is what Marie-Antoinette clearly might have done, had she followed her own line of thinking. But she listened instead to two men who persuaded her to act quite differently.” The two men Georgel refers to, the Abbé Vermond and Baron Breteuil, were the Cardinal’s sworn enemies.

Like Georgel, Mme Campan also went on to write her memoirs. She makes it clear that she does convict the Queen of a certain complicity, in that, when she received the jeweller’s letter and failed to understand a word of it, she gave it no further thought. But it also appears from Campan’s book that the Queen and her entourage were every bit as suspicious — without justification — of the Cardinal as his people were of her. Marie-Antoinette was convinced that Rohan had used her name in the forged letters to defraud Boehmer and Bassenge of the necklace, in order to repair his notorious financial position. Her phobia about Rohan was such that it even made her fear that he and his co-conspirators might have hidden the necklace in her bedroom with the intention of ‘finding’ it at a suitable moment and laying a false charge, the way people did in medieval legends. But however it was, if we knew nothing else about this episode, the Grand Almoner’s opinion of the Queen, and her opinion of him, constitutes the most frequently discussed topic in connection with the last days of the French monarchy.

From her prison Jeanne managed to send word to Nicole d’Oliva that she had been arrested on the basis of an evil slander, and that, because of the episode in the Bower of Venus, the same danger threatened her if she did not leave forthwith. The girl set off at once for Brussels with her current beau, Toussaint de Beausire. The Paris police quickly discovered her address and informed the French legation in that city. D’Oliva and her suitor were arrested and imprisoned. But their extradition was not a simple matter. Amongst the ancient privileges of the land of Brabant was one waiving the obligation to return refugees except in cases where they themselves requested it. So the police sent their wiliest operator, a man called Quidor, who quickly persuaded d’Oliva that it would be in her own interests to apply for extradition. Which is what happened; whereupon the French government, which revealed its economising tendency on the most surprising occasions, paid her full travel expenses, then locked them both up in the Bastille.

A few months later they were followed by Réteaux de Villette. Réteaux had fled to Geneva, had been arrested there and then extradited. The situation regarding La Motte was rather more complicated. He had gone to England, but even in those days the English were punctilious about such matters. They would not send refugees back for any reason; moreover, the French government was not especially popular in London at the time.

Since there was so little hope that the English authorities would return him, the Paris police decided on abduction. Their efforts in this direction read like a true-life detective story — it seems there are eternal truths even for crime writers. La Motte was living in Edinburgh as the paying guest of the family of an elderly Italian language teacher called Benevent Dacosta. He reckoned that this arrangement would attract the least attention to himself, since people would take him for a member of the family. But Dacosta was not just a language teacher. He was also a man of business, and the French ambassador to London, the Comte d’Adhémar, persuaded him to hand La Motte over for ten thousand guineas. He felt rather bad about doing it, he wrote, but poverty dictated his actions.

The plan involved two police officers travelling to Newcastle, where they were to meet Dacosta and La Motte. Two more officers, one of them the wily Quidor, would be waiting for them in a port called South Shields. French ships regularly called in there for coal, so their boat would not attract any particular notice. There, Dacosta was to betray La Motte. They would pour a soporific into his wine and carry him onto the boat while he was asleep — the classic formula.

The French police proceeded in a very circumspect and low-spirited sort of way. They knew that if the English collared them they would be hanged without mercy.

But the plan failed. First, because La Motte became suspicious and refused to go to South Shields. Secondly, because the agents were unable to find a suitable house in the port, and even if they had found one, Dacosta had insufficient money to pay the rent. Thirdly, and principally, because the Italian took fright. He feared that the scheme would fail and he would be hanged. Instead he revealed the whole plan to La Motte. La Motte, whose sunny disposition we have already observed, was not in the slightest bit angry, and helped his good friend spend the one thousand guineas he had had as an advance from the French.

Rohan, however, remained a prisoner in the Bastille. He could have had no complaint on grounds of comfort. The largest suite in the staff officers’ building was placed at his disposal. He took three footmen in with him, and was given a daily allowance of a hundred and twenty francs. (Should that be multiplied by ten?) He dined in princely style, and could receive any visitor he chose. He gave banquets for twenty people, with oysters and champagne. Because of the extraordinarily large number of his visitors the drawbridge was, most exceptionally, left down all day. Every afternoon he took his walk around the tower terrace, in his brown overcoat, with a large hat drawn down over his eyes, to the delight of the vast crowd of Parisians gathered below. In the city the only topic of conversation was the trial, and interest in it was just as strong abroad.

The King, following the rules, began by appointing Breteuil, as his Paris Minister, and Thiroux de Crosne, the Chief of Police, as examining judges. But Rohan rejected the first as a personal enemy, and the second as being of too low a social rank to question him. Vergennes, the Interior Minister, and Castries, Minister for the Navy, were brought in. The Cardinal gave his evidence coolly, shrewdly, and in strict accordance with the truth.

Jeanne’s hearing was somewhat stormier. She sat on the sellette (the prisoner’s bench, or rather stool) day after day for months, directly facing each witness. If they attacked her defences in one place, she would plug the gap in the wink of an eye with some impromptu remark that introduced three or four random new points; above all, she made fine use of that perennial woman’s weapon, hysteria. This Rohan, who had called her to account, how much money did he have? She hurled it in his face that he had been her lover. To Baron Planta, who had brought separate charges against her, she replied that he was only saying what he did because he had attempted violence on her, and got the worst of it. Father Loth she accused of living a riotous life, especially for a monk, and of procuring women for La Motte. She gave lurid details of Nicole d’Oliva’s moral life. She screamed at Cagliostro that he called her his “lamb” and was always billing and cooing, raising his eyes to the heavens, pronouncing great sayings, calling on God to witness, and pouring out his Italian and so-called Arabic jargon. There was no stopping her. The moment she opened her mouth a filthy and obscene atmosphere poured out and clouded the entire hearing.

Jeanne’s methods of defence always bring to mind that fearful scene when a pack of dogs have driven a cat into a corner. Realising that it cannot run up the wall, it suddenly turns on its attackers, seems to become twice the size it was before, hisses and makes the terrifying sound of a time bomb about to explode. If we were to erect a statue symbolising courage, it would have to depict a cat in this situation.

Carlyle, however, questions Jeanne’s courage. “Had Dame de Lamotte a certain greatness of character; at least, a strength of transcendent daring, amounting to the bastard-heroic? Great, indubitably great, is her dramaturgic and histrionic talent; but as for the rest, one must answer, with reluctance, No. Mrs Facing-both-ways is a ‘spark of vehement life’, but the farthest in the world from a brave woman … Her grand quality is to be reckoned negative: the ‘untameableness’ as of a fly; the ‘wax-cloth dress’ from which so much ran down like water.”

The housefly image is apt. But is the housefly not brave? We are not saying that Jeanne’s hysterical courage has any moral worth — but that she showed courage, indeed great courage, we would not venture to question. Carlyle himself says of her elsewhere: “O worthy … to have been Pope Joan thyself, in the old days;” and surely it took a devilish amount of courage for anyone to become a female Pope?

Louis XVI offered Rohan the choice of being tried either by himself, under royal jurisdiction, or by the Parlement. In a letter, co-signed by members of his family, which made clear how much they identified with him, Rohan chose to go before the Parlement. The letter was finely calculated, and indeed somewhat defiant:

Sire,

I had hoped, given the opportunity of a proper hearing, to be able to provide sufficient evidence to persuade Your Highness that I have been the victim of an intrigue. In that situation I could wish for no other jury than your own sense of justice and goodness. But since your refusal of a direct meeting between us deprives me of that hope, I accept with the most respectful gratitude Your Highness’ permission to establish my innocence through legal process.

This in fact meant: ‘If you accept the fact that I am innocent, I should be willing to submit myself to your sentence; but if not, the Parlement must decide between us.’

Rohan well understood the nature of his choice. The Parlement was the King’s greatest enemy. By giving way to Marie-Antoinette’s womanish anger and insisting, in contrast to Rohan’s openness, on having him arrested in an atmosphere of great scandal, Louis had committed his first major blunder. And now he made another, a hundred times greater and this time quite irreparable — he allowed those hostile to him to adjudicate the matter, so that, if they chose, they could pass judgement both on it and on the King.

Our Nordic friend Count Haga would certainly not have done that. Referring to the necklace trial, the Swedish King wrote to his confidant, Count C F Scheffer, as follows:

“I should have advised him, had I been asked, not to give such great éclat to this affair, which does not really concern the Queen, but which, if it does come to trial, might require a lot of uncomfortable explaining. We monarchs, though just as likely to be tripped up as the rest of humanity, have the advantage that we are not held to account for mistakes involving small amounts of money, and are generally trusted. But once we attempt to excuse ourselves, then we appear to acknowledge the possibility of blame on that side, something that would never occur to the common people of their own accord.” He felt that the necklace affair would damage the universal respect for the institution of the monarchy, and he was right.

Apart from the incompetence he showed, should we really blame the King for allowing the matter to pass into other hands and submitting it to the Parlement? It is possible to assume that he did this under the Queen’s influence. It is very interesting what Napoleon said in connection with this to a confidant on St Helena, where he had plenty of time to reflect.

“The Queen was innocent, and in order to give maximum publicity to her innocence, she wanted the Parlement to pass judgement on the case. The result was that everyone considered her guilty, and that undermined trust in the Royal Court.”

As is well known, the Paris Parlement of the day was neither a legislative body nor a house of representatives but the highest court of law. It was the Parlement not just of Paris but also of several other large provincial cities. Its members were paid for their services, like all judicial officers in the kingdom. Thus they had for many centuries been drawn from the wealthy upper bourgeoisie. One of the most important developments in French society was that the power of the King became entrenched at a very early date, and in consequence the bourgeoisie did not evolve into an urban patriciate ambitious for self-government, as in Italy, Germany and Flanders. Instead, they served the King, and in that service made their way as lawyers and state officials.

The most high-ranking section of the upper bourgeoisie consisted of those who held the administration of justice in their hands. A great many of them had attained nobility, the collective term for them being the noblesse de robe—the robe here signifying the judge’s gown.

Some were extremely rich, with palaces in the cities and mansions in the countryside, and lived like the true nobility, who were distinguished from them by the term noblesse d’épée—nobility of the sword. Some even came to rival the blue-blood aristocrats in the matter of debt. Their incomes were generally very considerable. M d’Aligre, the leader of the Paris Parlement who presided over the necklace trial, was worth 700,000 livres a year. But while there were those who displayed all the vices of privilege, the greater part were extremely respectable, almost puritanically solemn and plain-living people, exhibiting the true bourgeois mentality: sobriety, integrity and unquestionable probity.

By the eighteenth century all the institutions of the monarchy were to some extent dated or obsolete, and everywhere riddled with corruption, the justice system not excluded. Those who wanted reforms naturally played that up. They complained that judges were often too young, inexperienced, ill-educated, and susceptible to undue influence. Legal costs were intolerably high, secretaries had to be paid vast sums to expedite the astonishingly slow procedures, as did the huissiers, to deliver sentences already pronounced. The criminal justice arrangements were outmoded, cruel and inhumane. France, like Italy, was coming under the influence of the teachings of Beccaria, who urged radical changes to the system. He also demanded reform of the prisons. In 1782 the horrific For l’Évêque prison, whose inmates had to stand in water during years of high rainfall, was closed and the Hôtel de la Force built, where every prisoner had his own bed, and — to contemporary eyes — the whole place appeared astonishingly clean and comfortable.

The monarchy had tried on many occasions to reform the criminal system, but their intentions were always frustrated by the stubborn resistance of the Parlement. It was one of the most conservative bodies in all history. Every new law, and almost every other new development, was seen as an affront to its ancient rights and privileges. It is quite extraordinary the way it objected to everything: to the petite poste, by which private individuals delivered letters and packages; to the planting of potatoes, and even to the use of emetics. Above all, it opposed reform. In the eighteenth century, every right-thinking proposal for change made by a monarch foundered because of its opposition.

These abuses of power did nothing to harm its popularity. Neither the die-hard conservatives nor Voltaire, Diderot and the entire reformist camp of acerbic-minded philosophers ever attacked it. It never lost its popularity, because its members were eminent, belligerent and fearless, and were seen by the people as the representatives of the very idea of freedom.

Their ideal, since the start of the century, had been the British constitution, but by the time of Louis XVI their political theories had moved on. It was now accepted that every aspect of power, and all legal process, derived ultimately from the person of the King, but there was nonetheless a need for some sort of mediator between the monarch and his people to supervise the enactment of the laws he handed down: and that role fell to the Parlement.

In reality it had exercised this supervisory function for centuries, by virtue of the fact that its duty was to ‘register’ bills promulgated by the King — without such registration, bills could not become law. If the Parlement saw fit, it could block them. Naturally France was for this reason never an ‘absolute’ monarchy, since the King could not flatly impose his will against its members’ wishes. If the latter dragged their feet for too long and formally remonstrated with the King, he could call a lit de justice in his palace, at which he simply informed the relevant authorities that the bill was now in force. But this was very much a two-edged sword. It poisoned relations between the King and the Parlement, and with the passing of time the latter body became identified with protest, resisting everything, including the most welcome and necessary social reforms, since the very notion of ‘reform’ had come to be associated with ‘tyranny’.

It obstructed generally welcome measures because it felt that any increase in popular contentment resulting from initiatives handed down from above would at best treat the symptoms of the malaise rather than the malaise itself, or indeed, would exacerbate it by reinforcing the power of absolutism. And in these struggles the people, or at least the ‘Third Estate’ (the collective citizenry) stood not on the side of those reforms that would improve the lot of the people as a whole, but with the conservatives, the old reactionary Parlement, because they felt that freedom was more important than mere prosperity. Paradoxically enough, this conservatism did indeed represent a kind of freedom, as it had once before in the Roman Senate, against the ‘progressive’ dictatorship of Julius Caesar.

Under Louis XV the Parlement had waged war above all on the clergy. Its members mostly shared the mental outlook of the Jansenists. That grim tendency has very much the same sort of place in French history as Puritanism, the nonconformist movement, has in England, with its prohibition on worldly pomp and beauty in the church.

The Parlement’s long war against the clergy reveals the sociological roots of its animosity. As we have mentioned, by virtue of its upper-middle-class elements it represented the bourgeoisie as against the Church, the nobility and the Court. A century-and-a-half before the French Revolution, the same social stratum in England had fought in Cromwell’s revolution and then, at the end of the seventeenth century, in the ‘Glorious’ (and thoroughly bourgeois) Revolution, to create the British constitution. The citizenry no longer languished behind the nobility in terms of wealth and culture, and began to question why it was inappropriate for them to benefit from the laws and the higher life generally, as did the privileged few.

Such was the Parlement on whom the responsibility fell to decide Rohan’s case. Now we can understand why one of its most influential councillors, Fréteau de St Juste, rubbed his hands in glee when he heard that it was to come before it, and cried:

“What a stroke of luck! A swindling cardinal and the Queen embroiled in a fraud case! All that mud on the cross and the sceptre! What a triumph for the ideals of freedom! And how it will raise the importance of the Parlement!”

Now that we have introduced the Parlement, we must bring in the other side, the King. In all honesty we should have preferred to introduce him at the start, centre stage, along with the other dramatis personae. The only reason we did not was that the queue of people waiting to come on was rather lengthy, and we feared we might weary the reader who is interested in the ‘action’. But the fact that we were able to leave the King until now means that he is already established as a character. “The principal reason for the downfall of the French monarchy,” we read in Lavisse’s great Standard History of France, “was the failure of the King.”

Louis XVI was a very different person from the French Kings, the endless line of the Capet dynasty, who preceded and followed him. In some respects, both morally and as an individual, he was unlike any of them. The Kings of France owed their popularity to the fact that they shared the character traits of their people. For the most part they saw living as an art form: they loved women, food and drink; they relished brave, brief, triumphant adventures; they hated boredom, work and anything that went on too long, and they always wanted to be in the thick of things. That was true both of the grandest of them — Francis I and Henry IV — and of the gloomiest — Henry III, Louis XV and, after the Revolution, Charles X. But wise or cunning, they also produced kings worthy of the Age of Reason, such as Philippe-Auguste and, again after the Revolution, Louis XVIII. The most exceptional were both wise and chivalrous, like St Louis and Louis XIV. But our Louis was neither wise nor chivalrous. It was his brothers who inherited the royal qualities. The Comte de Provence was shrewd and cunning, while the Duc d’Artois had the adventurous traits. In his younger days it tormented the King that his brothers were so much more successful than he was, and when on one occasion a speaker praised his intellect, he ungraciously interrupted him:

“You are mistaken: I am not the clever one; that is my brother, the Comte de Provence.”

He possessed none of the characteristic traits of a French king. He was more like a German or some other northern prince. Which is not really all that surprising. The leading members of the French royal family had always found wives among the ruling houses of neighbouring countries, so there was far more foreign than French blood in his veins. His ancestor Louis XIV was married to Maria Theresa, the Infanta of Spain; his son, the ‘Great Dauphin’, to a Bavarian princess; his son, the Duc de Bourgogne, to the Princess of Savoy; his son, Louis XV, to the Polish Princess Maria Leszczynska, and his son, the Dauphin, to Louis XVI’s mother, the Saxon Princess Maria Josepha. So even if we consider only the interbreeding that had taken place since Louis XIV, Louis XVI had scarcely any French blood at all, not to mention the fact that Louis XIV’s mother had not been French, and so on and on. Viewed in this way, Louis XVI’s queen, the Austrian princess Marie-Antoinette, comes across as much more typically French in her character; which again should hardly surprise us, since she was Habsburg only on her mother’s side. On her father’s she sprang from the effectively French house of Lotharingia, or Lorraine, so that there was considerably more Gallic blood in her than in that scion of the Bourbons, her husband.

Naturally, until science sheds rather more light than at present on the secrets of heredity, this is all just a game. The King was unquestionably French, made so by the whole atmosphere and tradition, by upbringing and destiny, and no one in their wildest dreams would have called his Frenchness into question. But what is also beyond question is that there is every good reason why, in his external appearance, his physical movements, his gestures and temperament, he might have resembled one of his German or Polish ancestors.

Joseph II said of his brother-in-law that he was like primal matter before the proclamation Fiat lux. He classified him with those people whose minds are ruled by their bodies. This was shown by his favourite diversions: spending his free time in wood and metal workshops, or playing billiards. Had he not been born to be King, he would have been a conscientious, respectable, and no doubt perfectly contented craftsman.

But his real passion was for hunting — the sport of kings — which he pursued with even greater dedication than his forebears, clearly because only through frenzied activity and vigorous movement of the body could he work off his excess physical energy. It was the only time, it could be said, when he lost his timidity and clumsiness, found himself in his element, and emerged as a man. “His gentleness and altruism notwithstanding,” says Boiteaux, “he hardened, and would deal ruthlessly with people if anything got in the way of his freedom to exercise his royal prerogative of hunting, like some old Germanic tribal chief. If a peasant strayed into the royal forest he would be in a rage for the rest of the day. The roads would be closed and all work would stop in the fields for miles around.”

On these occasions he would even dispute the prize with his brother the Duc de Provence, and often did. The numbers were huge: in the fourteen years of his reign he took part in thirty-five fox, a hundred and four boar, one thousand two hundred and seven stag and two hundred and sixty six deer hunts.

As is well known, almost the only thing he ever noted in his diary, apart from where he attended mass, was the outcome of these expeditions. Even in the stormiest days of the Revolution, if he had done neither he would simply enter ‘rien’ (nothing). One cannot be sure whether this should be taken as yet another sign of his mental hebetude; the diary was his personal secret, in which he wrote only what touched on his most personal life. Hunting and religion — these were the two areas in which his soul felt truly at home. Alongside the painstaking craftsman, there was a medieval lord of the manor inside him.

But also a minor civil servant, and an accountant. He kept a meticulous accounts book. In it he wrote what he spent his pocket money on, carefully totting up the receipts, his gains and losses at cards, and even what he paid his ‘royal secretary’ (for duties he carried out himself). He notes that he gave twelve thousand livres to the Queen, a figure that recurs frequently. But he also records that he spent three livres on bathwater; thirty-six on shoes; one livre, eighteen sols on a leg of mutton; twelve sols on a bottle of red wine; three livres on a dozen fresh herrings … What is really mystifying about these notes is that there were eight cobblers in the royal household who submitted large bills every year, while the bouche du roi, the ‘King’s mouth’, as the royal kitchen was known, spent several thousand livres on his victuals every day. But then nothing is more impenetrable than the finances of the Ancien Régime. Apparently even Louis occasionally found them confusing. In 1782 he writes in his accounts book that some sort of error must have crept in, since he finds an item in the same notebook which he had completely overlooked, and he has to start the whole reckoning again from the beginning. The sum he had failed to notice was 42,377 livres …

This is the outer aspect of the man who is ruled by his body. However active he is, he remains fat. This is true even in his youth, and thereafter he puts weight on ‘in the twinkling of an eye’. His gaucheness is clearly a version of the fat little boy’s withdrawn and embarrassed shyness. Otherwise his obesity is not a pathological symptom; there is no need to think about mysterious glandular problems. In one respect he had a great deal in common with his ancestor Louis XIV: he too ate a huge amount.

The public dinners at which he sat with the Queen (though Marie-Antoinette absolutely refused to touch food in front of an audience) consisted of fifty courses: four soups, two large entrées—beef and cabbage, tenderloin veal spit-roasted; sixteen entrées—giblets of turkey au consommé, sweetbreads en papillotte, suckling pig, roast mutton chop, calf’s head, and so forth; four hors d’œuvres—forequarters of veal, fillet of rabbit, cold young turkey cock, leg of veal. Then six baked dishes, two intermediary entremets and sixteen small entremets—vegetables, eggs, milk dishes; next, the dessert — grapes, pomegranates, pears, bitter oranges and so forth; and last of all, four hundred chestnuts and forty-eight slices of bread and butter. It seems unlikely that he ate all of these, but it is said that he set about doing so with a will.

He was not just fat: he was slovenly. While he was still the Dauphin, the Neapolitan ambassador described him to Queen Maria Carolina as “selvaggio e rozzo, a segno che sembra nato ed educato in un bosco”—like a wild man of the woods. Mme Campan, who was truly well-disposed towards him, later wrote: “His features were noble enough, and expressive of a certain melancholy; his deportment was clumsy and lacked distinction; his person was worse than neglected; his hair, though tended by a skilled barber, was always unkempt, because he took no care of it. His voice was not particularly harsh, but nor was it pleasant: when he became excited in conversation, it became sharp and high-pitched.”

Along with this physical makeup went a certain boorishness. Louis had a tendency to brawling. Even after he was married he came to blows with his brother the Comte de Provence over some trifle, in the presence of their two wives. He loved crude jokes, if only to make a stand against the over-refinement of the Court. When Benjamin Franklin visited Paris it became the fashionable thing to sing the praises of the hero of American freedom and inventor of the lightning conductor, and women wore medallions bearing the inscription:

Eripuit caelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis

Lightning burst from the sky and dashed the sceptre from the tyrant’s grasp.

So the King had a chamber pot made in Sèvres carrying the same quotation, and sent it to the Duchesse Diane de Polignac, one of Franklin’s enthusiastic admirers.

Otherwise, his mental and moral attitudes were inherited from his father (the Dauphin, the son of Louis XV, who died young). The Dauphin had lived his exemplary married life, with the ‘gloomy Pepa’, as Louis XV called his daughter-in-law, in scorned and scornful isolation in his father’s frivolous and sinful Court, and, like so many sons, had made it his business to oppose everything his father did, to expiate his sins. He was deeply religious, immersed himself in serious studies, and gave much thought to how he might make the French people happy.

Louis XVI also enjoyed serious study. He read English readily and well (he was especially fond of Milton) and concerned himself above all with history and geography, the true subject matter of kings. But literature held little interest for him, and this was a great pity. It was a major deficiency in a French king at a time when his people read feverishly and unceasingly, and acquired their ideas about the world through the medium of the printed word.

He was deeply religious. That was how he had been raised, first by his father and then by the man entrusted with his upbringing, the Duc de Vauguyon — about whose own piety there is little to be said. But his own nature inclined him that way too, and his religion gave a deeper colouring to his innate good-heartedness and the love he felt for his people. His faith was the secret, immeasurable source of inner strength that enabled him — a man who in life was so shy and self-effacing — in his hours of trial and affliction to face death like a hero and a martyr: a death that retrospectively ennobled the memory of all he had done before.

He lived in Puritan simplicity. He loathed the pomp of the Court, and his first act after mounting the throne was to incur the bitterness of the aristocracy by trimming the royal household. Amongst its members was a class of persons known as the menus plaisirs, the ‘little diversions’, whose honour and duty it was to attend to the monarch’s pleasure. No sooner had he been crowned than their intendant La Ferté presented himself to the King, who asked him:

“Who on earth are you?”

“I am the person in charge of the ‘little diversions’, sire.”

“Well, my little diversion is to take a stroll in the park,” the King replied.

But the greatest of his virtues, and what might indeed be considered his dominant characteristic, was his goodness of heart. This was a king who spontaneously and sincerely loved his people. This sincerity shines through his remark: “Il n’y a que Monsieur Turgot et moi qui aimons le peuple.”—It is only Monsieur Turgot and I who love the people.

Gentle and humane, he had a horror of cruelty and bloodshed. He was prone to tears and full of sensibility, as was the entire age, but in his case it came from the heart. When Chamfort’s neoclassic drama Mustafa and Zéangir was staged in the royal theatre — a play that celebrates sibling love — he shed a fountain of tears. He actually loved his own brothers and sisters, which, in the circumstances, and considering their own cooler feelings for him, was rather remarkable.

I could continue to enumerate his virtues, and that might seem well worth doing in view of all that has been said about his weaknesses. But there really is no need. In recent decades royalist historians have reiterated to the point of tedium what a kind and noble soul he was.

We must also consider how very different a king was from an ordinary mortal. From the moment of his birth, he was raised in so rarified and sheltered a world that it must necessarily have weakened his grasp of reality. He could never become familiar with the common people and the difficult raw material of their daily lives. For this reason — because they were an unknown quantity — he was every bit as uncomfortable meeting commoners as his grandfather, Louis XV, had been. The reason why he failed to recognise the danger hanging over his throne, and made no effort to counter it, is, quite clearly, that he was a king. In the clear sunny sky depicted on the ceiling of his throne room he never noticed the gathering storm clouds …

However, contrary to what I have just argued, we have also to recognise that the rulers of old lived in much greater proximity to life and to their people than those of today. Or more precisely, the people of those days lived in greater proximity to their rulers. They could enter their great halls, stroll in their parks and shout abuse at them with impunity. Louis XVI probably knew much more about his people and their moods than the leaders of society today. Somehow, both monarch and people were cut from the same cloth. The social gulf between them was confined to the external world, not the inner one. The King was more akin in spirit to his serf than the director of a modern business is to his office-boy; and more able to strike the right note when they spoke to one another.

The sad thing is that it should be necessary at all to draw attention to Louis’ virtues, as opposed to his shortcomings. Those virtues did almost as much to pave the way for the Revolution as did the sins of his predecessors. As Sainte-Beuve expressed it, rather more elegantly: “Louis XVI’s spiritual virtues ran far beyond what was required for the role of king. It was his very kindness and humanity that drove him unremittingly towards the role of sacrificial victim, and, as he stumbled from one act of weakness to another, the only way in which he would ever attain greatness was through martyrdom.” And so this kind-hearted, saintly king proved to have been of the least possible use to the institution he represented at that precise moment in history. Had he possessed the easy-going, sanguine, rococo spirit of Gustav III of Sweden, he might have come up with some stratagem to protect, or at least prolong, its existence. But at that precise moment only a king with the mind of a Machiavelli could have measured up to the situation. Instead, they had Louis XVI, the humane, indulgent soul who loved his people and shed bitter tears over their fate.

“On that final day,” Sainte-Beuve continues, “Marie-Antoinette poured out her heart, urging him to die like a king, like a true descendant of Louis XIV. But he had resolved rather to die like a Christian, as his forebear St Louis had done.” It was the fate of the French monarchy that this Louis had more in him of his sainted ancestor than of Louis XIV.