32 The New York Review
countries, and this recognition would
prompt the king’s two brothers and
other important émigrés to return to
France and stop fomenting counter-
revolution. War would be avoided,
order would be restored, and the revo-
lution, Barnave hoped, would end with
the guarantee of fundamental changes
but the monarchy still in place.
None of these plans came to fruition,
though they were no more fantastical
than the other options then under con-
sideration. In a country shaped by cen-
turies of monarchical rule, a republic
remained inconceivable for most peo-
ple, including the majority of the Na-
tional Assembly, even after the flight of
the king and queen. It only became a
viable alternative when war threatened
to destroy the revolution altogether;
the republic was not declared until Sep-
tember 1792.
The monarchists proved incapable
of formulating a unified position, how-
ever, much less a united government.
The ultra- royalists wanted war with
Austria because it would provide the
émigré aristocrats huddling across the
border with the armies needed to defeat
the revolutionaries and bring back the
old regime. Constitutional monarchists
aimed to avoid war, and at first they
had the advantage that Leopold, his
sister’s travails notwithstanding, pre-
ferred to see France beset by internal
turmoil that would keep it preoccupied
at home rather than venturing abroad.
The emperor convinced himself that
the mere threat of retaliation would
force the revolutionaries to back down
and that if war came—which it did, at
least partly in response to his and Prus-
sian attempts at intimidation—it would
be short and entirely to his advantage,
especially once he concluded a secret
alliance with his arch- enemy Prussia in
February 1792.
War turned out to be unavoidable, but
only after the initiatives undertaken by
Barnave and others failed to shore up
the monarchy. In April 1792 the king
himself proposed a declaration of war
on Austria because he dreamed that it
would finally bring resolution. Either
France would lose within months or,
if French armies managed somehow to
prevail, the aristocratic commanders
would turn their troops back on Paris
and chase out the increasingly bump-
tious republicans. These projections
proved as illusory as those of Austria
and Prussia. The menace and then re-
ality of invasion galvanized the people
of Paris and radicalized the deputies
who had been elected to a new Leg-
islative Assembly in September 1791.
They arrested the king in August 1792
and called a constitutional convention
that began by declaring a republic, then
brought him to trial and executed him
as a traitor.
By then, Barnave had long since
given up and gone back to Grenoble,
and Marie- Antoinette had returned
to her families, both the French and
Austrian ones. She sent the French
campaign plans to the Austrians and to
Fersen, whom she loved and who was
most likely her lover, and she arranged
for the king to promise a subsidy to
the Prussians to pay for their invasion.
The sudden unraveling of the unlikely
partnership between Barnave and the
queen in early January 1792 raises
many questions. Since no falling out
between the two has been recorded,
why did he leave Paris and attempt to
retire from public life? Given Marie-
Antoinette’s almost immediate rever-
sion to the counterrevolutionary camp,
was her liaison with Barnave ever more
than a ruse to gain insight into the
workings of the most powerful faction
in the National Assembly after the
royal family’s failed escape?
Hardman insists that both of them
were sincere. Barnave saw an opportu-
nity to get the queen and king to see the
necessity of cooperating with the con-
stitutional monarchists if they wanted
to save the monarchy and themselves.
To explain his departure, he cited fam-
ily business and a simple desire to re-
turn home. A new assembly had been
elected, and by law he could not serve
in it. For her part, Marie- Antoinette
implied in her letters to others that
she never embraced Barnave’s views
wholeheartedly, yet she never said any-
thing negative or derisory about him
or his closest associates. At the end
of July 1791 she wrote to the Austrian
ambassador:I have reason to be fairly satisfied
with... [Adrien] Duport, [Alex-
andre de] Lameth and Barnave.
Right now I have a sort of corre-
spondence with the last two which
no one knows about, even their
friends. I have to do them justice.
Although they always stick to their
opinions I have always found in
them great openness, strength and
a true desire to restore order and
consequently royal authority.Hardman pays little attention to
Lameth, who was also a deputy, but
this may simply reflect the accidents
of history. Neither he nor Barnave
wanted their secret contacts with the
royal family to be known, and Bar-
nave’s correspondence with the queen
didn’t come to light until the late nine-
teenth century, when their letters were
discovered in a castle that belonged
to the family of Fersen’s sister. Marie-
Antoinette had given her exchange of
letters with Barnave to Fersen for safe-
keeping, even though he resented Bar-
nave’s hold on the queen’s affection.
In the face of persistent rumors,
Barnave had repeatedly denied any
commerce with the royal family after
their return to Paris. A document dis-
covered in the king’s papers in August
1792 sealed his fate. This “plan for a
ministerial committee arranged with
MM. Barnave and Lameth” appeared
to prove that the two deputies had
been consulting with the king and his
ministers. Barnave was immediately
arrested in Grenoble, where he spent
fifteenth months in prison writing an
account of the revolution and his par-
ticipation in it. In those pages, and
again during his trial, he insisted that
he had had no personal contact with
the queen or the royal family after their
return to Paris. His trial took place in
Paris a month after the queen’s and led
to the same result: execution by guillo-
tine. Lameth had fled into exile, which
Barnave could also have done since he
lived close to the Swiss border—a fact
that he cited futilely in his defense.
The Barnave episode is fascinating,
but in the end it occupied only a brief
moment in the eventful, contentious,
and tragic life of Marie- Antoinette. To
call their alliance a duumvirate assigns
it more weight than it merits. They
could concert their efforts to obtain theoutcomes they considered imperative,
but their voices did not command au-
thority on their own. They had to work
through the ministers, and the minis-
ters could pursue their own initiatives
that ran counter to those of the queen
and Barnave. Their hand- picked minis-
ter of war, Louis, Comte de Narbonne,
wanted a war with Austria because he
thought it would strengthen the monar-
chy, and he mistakenly believed that he
could secure Prussian neutrality. Bar-
nave gave up on the partnership with
the queen once he saw that the war
party was inexorably gaining ground.At her trial in October 1793, Marie-
Antoinette faced three main accusa-tions: that with the connivance of the
king’s brothers and ministers she had
squandered the nation’s finances, that
she had informed France’s enemies
of the war plans, and that she had fo-
mented civil war in various regions
of the republic. She could not but be
guilty since she was a royalist in a re-
public, and her own future depended
on overthrowing that republic. Though
her reputation for expensive baubles
was well deserved, the kingdom’s finan-
cial problems went much deeper than
her extravagant expenditures on dia-
monds and renovations of Versailles,
her gifts to favorites, and even her of-
fers of funds to her brother the emperor
(the revolutionaries never learned of
the promises to pay the Prussians if
they invaded). She did betray French
campaign plans to the Austrians, and
her very existence might have helped
provoke civil war, but the former had
no real effect on the course of the war,
and while in prison after August 1792,
she was hardly in a position to conspire
with anyone.
The parade of other charges raised
at her trial make it clear that more was
at stake than the guilt or innocence of
the former queen. The public prosecu-
tor concluded his opening statement
with a scurrilous diatribe that reflected
the influence of all those underground
pamphlets claiming to detail the pro-
miscuity of the queen:That finally the widow Capet, im-
moral in every respect, the new
Agrippina, is so perverse and so
familiar with every crime that,
forgetting her quality of motherand the limits placed by the laws
of nature, she did not blush to give
herself over (with Louis Charles
Capet [her eight- year- old son] and
by his own admission) to indecen-
cies whose very name makes one
shudder.Her son had been kept separate from
her for the three months preceding her
trial. Repeatedly badgered to inform
on his mother, he finally signed a state-
ment that she had taught him to mastur-
bate and that as a consequence he was
left with a swollen testicle that needed
treatment. When pressed on this charge,
the former queen refused to dignify it
with a response on the grounds that “it
would be against nature for a mother to
reply to such an accusation.”
Marie- Antoinette’s spirited defense
of herself at the trial confirms Hard-
man’s portrait of her as intelligent,
knowledgeable, and quite capable of
standing up for her own interests. He
sees a mixture of contradictory qual-
ities: she was a loving mother, an in-
terfering wife, vengeful to a fault, a
high- stakes gambler, and before 1789,
at least, a compulsive pleasure- seeker
who could not have enough diamonds,
dresses, hats, or horses. Even Hardman,
however, has trouble answering the
nagging question that confronts any-
one who reads the slightest scrap about
the queen: Why was she so hated? He
considers all the reasons cited then and
since—her attempts to govern from
behind the throne, her extravagance,
her willingness to do anything for her
favorites—but finds them inadequate
to explain the level of detestation she
clearly inspired.
A satisfying answer to the question
requires a bit more speculation than
Hardman wants to entertain. Part of
it is perennial. It is difficult to resist
the parallel with Hillary Clinton, who
despite her educated manner, sober
clothing, and wonky intelligence was
similarly dragged through the mud
because she was a woman close to
and possibly actually in power. Some
people, women as well as men, find
the idea of women in power terrifying
and hence will believe anything about
them. Part of the answer, however, is
very much contingent on the events
and particular personalities of the
1790s. Fashioning a republic out of a
centuries- old monarchy was no small
task.
The most determined republicans
fastened upon the king as the essen-
tial sacrificial victim in securing that
transition, though they would not
have put it that way. If the king was
executed after a trial by the assem-
bled representatives of the nation,
then a new order could be established.
In the event, the king turned out to
be an unsatisfactory victim; he had
never professed anything but love for
his people, and with his mild manner,
even at his trial, he hardly seemed
an incarnation of evil that deserved
eradication. The queen, “the Aus-
trian bitch,” fit the bill in a way that
the king never could. Killing her, after
heaping every manner of opprobrium
on her head, was an act of ritual pu-
rification. It failed to work, and more
deaths followed. The queen ended up
being remembered for her youth and
not as the white- haired woman in a
white shift who kept her gaze trained
on the buildings she passed on her
way to the guillotine. QAntoine Barnave as both ‘The man of the
people 1789’ and ‘The man of the court
1791’; artist unknown, 1791Trusteesof^ theBritish^Museum