November 5, 2020 31
Why Was She So Hated?
Lynn Hunt
Marie Antoinette’s World:
Intrigue, Infidelity, and
Adultery in Versailles
by Will Bashor.
Rowman and Littlefield, 297 pp., $24.95
Marie- Antoinette :
The Making of a French Queen
by John Hardman.
Yale University Press, 363 pp., $30.00
Lock her up! In this case, they not only
locked her up but also cut off her head.
It is not often that a queen is arrested,
tried, and publicly executed. Henry
VIII had two of his wives beheaded,
one after a trial, the other by bill of at-
tainder, but their executions took place
in the privacy of the Tower of Lon-
don. Marie- Antoinette’s problem was
not her husband, Louis XVI, who was
tried and executed for treason in Janu-
ary 1793. At the time of her own trial
nine months later, she found herself the
former queen in a year- old republic.
Although the prosecution of the king
could be justified by the revolutionaries
on legal and political grounds, the pro-
ceeding against his queen raised more
eyebrows, since in France a woman
could never hold the throne in her own
right.
Marie- Antoinette suffered her fate
because of her reputation as a heedless
spender of public funds, behind- the-
scenes manipulator of ministers, coun-
terrevolutionary conspirer, and, not
least, unbridled libertine. She had been
a controversial figure almost from the
moment she set foot in France in 1770
as the fourteen- year- old daughter of
the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa,
for the Austrian Habsburgs had long
been sworn enemies of France. The
diplomatic and military realignment
that had taken place during the Seven
Years’ War (1756–1763), in which
France and Austria were allies, had
not pleased everyone at the French
court, and those who opposed it did
not hesitate to feed the rumor mill
against Marie- Antoinette. Later, the
revolutionaries had only to mobilize
this often pornographic pamphleteer-
ing to their own ends. In death she
became for some a martyr of a daz-
zling age now tragically darkened, for
others a reprehensible symbol of aris-
tocratic arrogance, as conveyed by the
apocryphal remark “let them eat cake”
(when there was no bread). Over time,
the queen perhaps got the last word, as
she gained an enduring celebrity as the
embodiment of youth, elegance, and
taste.*
The most influential purveyor of the
martyr image wrote presciently about
her a full four years before her death.
The Anglo- Irish politician Edmund
Burke reacted with fury to the uprising
of October 1789, in which thousands
of Parisian market women tramped
in the rain to Versailles, attacked the
chateau with the men who had joined
them, and dragged the royal family to
Paris. The queen was forced to flee her
private rooms through a secret pas-
sage to avoid being killed. Two of her
bodyguards were hacked down. Burke
nostalgically recalled seeing Marie-
Antoinette in person when she was still
a young wife and not yet queen: “I saw
her just above the horizon, decorat-
ing and cheering the elevated sphere
she just began to move in,—glittering
like the morning- star, full of life, and
splendor, and joy.” He expected ten
thousand swords to leap to her defense
in October 1789, and “little did I dream
that I should have lived to see such di-
sasters fallen upon her in a nation of
gallant men.”
The queen’s degradation—“that
elevation and that fall!”—prompted
Burke to formulate his doctrine of
conservatism, in which he defended
monarchy, religion, and tradition as es-
sential to good order. From the specta-
cle of her adversity he concluded thatthe age of chivalry is gone.—That
of sophisters, oeconomists, and
calculators, has succeeded....
Never, never more, shall we behold
that generous loyalty to rank and
sex, that proud submission, that
dignified obedience, that subor-
dination of the heart, which kept
alive, even in servitude itself, the
spirit of an exalted freedom.Thanks to the “new conquering em-
pire of light and reason,” he lamented,
“all the decent drapery of life is to be
rudely torn off.” The consequences
for royalty already loomed: “On this
scheme of things, a king is but a man;
a queen is but a woman; a woman is
but an animal; and an animal not of
the highest order.” Burke would not
have been surprised that the royal
family’s bungled attempt to flee Paris
in June 1791 spurred the diffusion of
crude images of the king and queen as
barnyard animals being returned to the
stable.
At the opposite end of the spectrum
from Burke stands Will Bashor, as is
evident from the subtitle of his book,
Marie Antoinette’s World: Intrigue,
Infidelity, and Adultery in Versailles.
That is, unfortunately, the only com-
parison that can be drawn between the
two authors, because while Burke was
inspired by the queen’s fate to think
deeply about the social and affective
bases of governing, Bashor simply
seeks to provide titillation. Following
in the footsteps of a long line of de-
tractors, he blames her downfall on her
own “thoughtless, fantasy- driven, and
notorious antics.” He reproduces large
swaths of the pornographic pamphlets
written against her and devotes a full
chapter to the entirely speculative hy-
pothesis that she suffered from a sexu-
ally transmitted disease. The few facts
of her life are overshadowed by analy-
sis of her handwriting and her astrolog-
ical chart.Although Bashor admits that the
queen faced her execution with a brav-
ery that was noted even by the fiercest
republicans, his only interest is her sex-
ual reputation. Thus the final chapter,
titled “Guilty?,” focuses exclusively on
the charge of adultery rather than the
accusations raised at her trial. Bashor
pronounces her guilty of adultery but
forgivable because she had been sent
to “a life in the vile environment of the
Château of Versailles.”John Hardman occupies a middle
position on this spectrum of opinions,
but his stance is not just middle- of- the-
road. Marie- Antoinette: The Making of
a French Queen presents her as much
more than a symbol whose meaning
is in the eye of her beholder. In Hard-
man’s telling she is neither martyr nor
voluptuary but rather a serious partic-
ipant in politics. Despite her lack of
education, Marie- Antoinette quickly
learned to make her way among the
various factions at the French court,
and from 1787 onward, Hardman
claims, she intervened with increasing
success in the selection of ministers
and the determination of policy. She
was able to act in this manner because
the king lost his nerve in the face of a
growing fiscal crisis and the adamant
refusal of the courts and specially con-
vened aristocratic assemblies to agree
to his plans for reform. The real twist
in the tale came in 1791, however, when
the queen entered into an improbable
alliance with Antoine Barnave, a bril-
liant twenty- nine- year- old lawyer from
Grenoble and leading revolutionary.
Barnave was one of the three com-
missioners from the National Assem-
bly sent to accompany the royal family
back to Paris after their attempted flight
that June. Hardman’s evocative pages
on the “squalid” eight days it took
them to return set the stage for what
followed, which he calls a duumvirate,
an experiment in joint rule by the
queen and Barnave during four crucial
months at the end of 1791. As the sun
beat down and ominously silent crowds
gathered alongside the carriage carry-
ing the royal family, one of the other
commissioners flirted with the king’s
sister while taunting the queen about
her presumed affair with the Swedish
nobleman Axel von Fersen, who had
organized the ill- fated flight. Barnave,
in contrast, showed real concern for
the family and gradually won the con-
fidence of the queen. After their return
to Paris, and despite the official fiction
that the royal family had been kid-
napped, the king and queen were kept
under strict surveillance, making it im-
possible for Barnave to visit them in
a public manner. So he and the queen
exchanged secret letters using a simple
code for names. (Barnave was called
‘2:1,’ after the alphabetic position of
the first two letters of his name.)
The supposed goal of this pact was
a strengthened constitutional monar-
chy. The king would agree to accept a
constitution in the belief that Barnave
could engineer changes in the mon-
arch’s favor. The queen would get her
brother, the Austrian emperor Leo-
pold II, to signal his acquiescence by
renewing the alliance between the twoMarie-Antoinette; unfinished portrait by Alexander Kucharsky, 1791–1792©Châteaude^ Versailles/RMN/ChristopheFouin*Her image was the theme of a recent
exhibition at the Conciergerie in Paris,
where she was imprisoned before her
execution and which is now a histor-
ical monument. “Marie- Antoinette:
Metamorphosis of an Image” (October
16, 2019–January 26, 2020) brought
together hundreds of personal items,
postcards, posters, video clips of mov-
ies, and dresses to show the continuing
power of the figure of the queen.