Marie Antoinette presents to history a character which it is of the
highest interest to regard as a whole. It is the business of her
biographers to consider that character as a whole; but in her connection
with the Revolution there is but one aspect of it which is of
importance, and that is the attitude which such a character was bound to
take towards the French nation in the midst of which the Queen found
herself.
It is the solution of the whole problem which the Queen’s action sets
before us to apprehend the gulf that separated her not only from the
French temperament, but from a comprehension of all French society. Had
she been a woman lacking in energy or in decision, this alien character
in her would have been a small matter, and her ignorance of the French
in every form of their activity, or rather her inability to comprehend
them, would have been but a private failing productive only of certain
local and immediate consequences, and not in any way determining the
great lines of the revolutionary movement.
As it was, her energy was not only abundant but steadfast; it grew more
secure in its action as it increased with her years, and the initiative
which gave that energy its course never vacillated, but was always
direct. She knew her own mind, and she attempted, often with a partial
success, to realise her convictions. There was no character in touch
with the Executive during the first years of the Revolution comparable
to hers for fixity of purpose and definition of view.
It was due to this energy and singleness of aim that her
misunderstanding of the material with which she had to deal was of such
fatal importance.
It was she who chose, before the outbreak of the Revolution, the
succession of those ministers both Liberal and Reactionary, whose unwise
plans upon either side precipitated violence. It was she who called and
then revoked, and later recalled to office the wealthy and
over-estimated Necker; she who substituted for him, and then so
inopportunely threw over Calonne, the most national of the precursors of
the Revolution, and ever after her most bitter enemy; it was she who
advised the more particularly irritating details of resistance after the
meeting of the first revolutionary Parliament; it was she who presided
over (and helped to warp) the plans for the flight of the royal family;
it was she who, after this flight had failed, framed a definite scheme
for the coercion of the French people by the Governments of Europe; it
was she who betrayed to foreign chanceries the French plan of campaign
when war had become inevitable; finally, it was she who inspired the
declaration of Brunswick which accompanied the invasion of French
territory, and she was in particular the author of the famous threat
therein contained to give over Paris to military execution, and to hold
all the popular authorities responsible with their lives for the
restoration of the pre-revolutionary state of affairs.
As research proceeds, the capital effect of this woman’s continual and
decided interference will be more and more apparent to historians.
Now Marie Antoinette’s conception of mankind in general was the
conception that you will find prevalent in such societies as that
domestic and warm centre which had nourished her childhood. The romantic
affection of a few equals, the personal loyalty of a handful of personal
servants, the vague histrionic content which permeates the poor at the
sight of great equipages and rich accoutrements, the cheers of a crowd
when such symbols accompanying monarchy are displayed in the
streets--all these were for Marie Antoinette the fundamental political
feelings of mankind. An absence of them she regarded with bewilderment,
an active opposition to them she hated as something at once
incomprehensible and positively evil.
There was in all this illusion, of course, a great element of what the
English call middle class, and the French bourgeois. To be quite
ignorant of what servitors will say of their masters behind their backs;
not to appreciate that heroic devotion is the faculty of a few; never
to have imagined the discontents of men in general, and the creative
desire for self-expression which inspires men when they act politically;
not to know that men as a whole (and particularly the French people) are
not deceived by the accidents of wealth, nor attach any real inferiority
to poverty; to despise the common will of numbers or to doubt its
existence; to see society established in a hierarchy not of office but
of leisure: all this may seem to the democrat a very unnatural and
despicable mood. But it was not despicable, still less unnatural; in the
case of Marie Antoinette: it was the only experience and the only
conception of society which had ever been given her. She had always
believed, when she gazed upon a mass of the populace, that the
difference between the crowd and herself was a moral reality. The
contrast in external habits between the wealthy, the middle class, and
the poor--a contrast ultimately produced by differences in the
opportunity and leisure which wealth affords--she thought to be
fundamental. Just as children and certain domestic pet animals regard
such economic accidents in society as something real which
differentiates men, so did she;--but she happened to nourish this
illusion in the midst of a people, and within a day’s walk of a capital,
where the misconception had less hold than in any other district of
Europe.
Of the traits peculiar to the French she knew nothing, or, to put it
more strongly, she could not believe that they really existed.
The extremes of cruelty into which this people could fall were
inconceivable to her, as were also the extremes of courage to which they
can rise under the same excitements as arouse them to an excess of
hatred. But that character in the French which she most utterly failed
to foresee or to comprehend, was their power of _corporate
organisation_.
That a multitude could instruct and order themselves for a common
purpose, rapidly acquire and nominate the officers who should bring that
purpose to fruition, and in general pass in one moment from a mere
multitude to an incipient army--that was a faculty which the French had
and have to a peculiar degree, and which she (like so many of our own
contemporaries, and especially those of German blood) could not believe
to be real. This faculty in the French, when it took action and was
apparent in the physical struggles of the Revolution, seemed to her, to
the very end, a sort of nightmare; something which, by all the laws of
reality, _ought not_ to be happening, but somehow or other _was_
happening in a manner evilly miraculous. It was her ignorance upon this
main point of all that caused her to rely so continually upon the use of
the regular forces, and of those forces in insufficient numbers. She
could not but believe that a few trained soldiery were necessarily the
masters of great civilian bodies; their uniforms were a powerful
argument with her, and mere civilian bodies, however numerous, were
always, in her conception, a dust of disparate and inchoate humanity.
She believed there was nothing to attack or resist in popular numbers
but the opinion, the fear, or the cupidity of the individual. In this
error of judgment concerning the French people she was not peculiar: it
is an error repeated over and over again by foreigners, and even by some
native commentators when they seek to account for some national movement
of the Gauls. The unlearning of it is the first lesson which those who
would either administrate or resist the French should learn.
In the matter of religion (which the reader may see in these pages to be
of such moment in the revolutionary story), the queen was originally far
more indifferent than her husband, though she observed a certain measure
of personal practice. It was not until her heavy misfortunes came upon
her that any degree of personal devotion appeared in her daily life,
though it must be admitted that, by a sort of premonition of disaster,
she turned to religion in the months immediately preceding the outbreak
of the reform.
It remains to describe the personal effect she had upon those who were
in her immediate presence. Most of the French aristocracy she repelled.
The same misfortune which made her unable to understand the French
temperament as a whole divorced her from that particular corner of it
which took the shape of French aristocratic tradition. She did not
understand its stiffness, its exactitude, its brilliancy or its
hardness: and she heartily disliked all four.
On this account she produced on the great families of her court, and
especially upon the women of them, an effect of vulgarity. Had she
survived, and had her misfortunes not been of so tragic an intensity,
the legend she would have left in French society would certainly have
been one of off-handed carelessness, self-indulgence, and lack of
dignity which have for the French of that rank the savour that a loud
voice, a bad accent, an insufficient usage in the rules of daily
conduct, leave upon what is left of a corresponding rank in England
to-day.
She was, on the other hand, easily deceived by the flattery of place
seekers, and the great power which she wielded in politics just before
the Revolution broke out made her, as it were, a sort of _butt_ of the
politicians.
They haunted her presence, they depended upon her patronage, and, at the
same time, they secretly ridiculed her. Her carriage, which was designed
to impress onlookers and did have that effect upon most foreigners,
seemed to most of the French observers (of a rank which permitted them
to approach her familiarly) somewhat theatrical and sometimes actually
absurd. The earnestness which she displayed in several lines of conduct,
and notably in her determined animosity to certain characters (as that
of La Fayette, for instance), was of an open and violent sort which
seemed to them merely brutal and unintelligent; her luxury, moreover,
was noticed by the refined world of Versailles to be hardly ever of her
own choosing, but nearly always practised in imitation of others.
In connection with that trait of luxury, the reader must appreciate at
the outset that it was grievously exaggerated by her contemporaries, and
has been still more exaggerated by posterity. She was not a very
frivolous, still less a dissipated, woman. She was woefully loose in
tongue, but she was certainly virtuous.
She gambled, but as the times went, and the supposed unlimited fortune
of the Crown, her gambling was not often excessive; her expenditure upon
jewellery and dress would be thought most moderate to-day in the case of
any lady of our wealthier families. On the other hand, her whims were
continual and as continually changing, especially in the earlier part of
her life.
Since that surrounding world of the Court which she misunderstood and
which had no sympathy with her was ready to find some handle against
her, that handle of dissipation was the easiest for them to seize; but
the accusation was not a just one.
Had fortune made her the wife of a poor man in a lower class of society,
Marie Antoinette would have been a capable housewife: her abundant
energy would have found a proper channel, and she was in no way by
nature extravagant.
She had a few very passionate and somewhat too sentimental friendships,
some of which were returned, others of which their objects exploited to
their own advantage. The two most famous were her friendship for the
Princess de Lamballe and for Madame de Polignac. These moved her not
infrequently to unwise acts of patronage which were immediately seized
by the popular voice and turned against her. They were among the few
weaknesses apparent in her general temper. They were certainly ill
balanced and ill judged.
She indulged also in a number of small and unimportant flirtations which
might almost be called the routine of her rank and world; she had but
one great affection in her life for the other sex, and it was most
ardently returned. Its object was a Swedish noble of her own age, the
very opposite of the French in his temper, romantically chivalrous,
unpractical in the extreme, gentle, intensely reserved; his name Count
Axel de Fersen. The affair remained pure, but she loved him with her
whole heart, and in the last months of her tragedy this emotion must be
regarded as the chief concern of her soul. They saw each other but very
rarely, often they were separated for years; it was this, perhaps, which
lent both glamour and fidelity to the strange romance.