MARIE ANTOINETTE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE PYRENEES
PARIS
HILLS AND THE SEA
ON NOTHING AND KINDRED SUBJECTS
ON EVERYTHING
EMMANUEL BURDEN, MERCHANT
THE CHANGE IN THE CABINET
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration:
THE LAST ACT OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY
ORDER GIVEN ON 10TH AUGUST, 1792, TO THE GUARD AT THE TUILERIES TO
CEASE FIRE AND RETURN TO BARRACKS
_On the authenticity of this document see Appendix C_
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_MARIE
ANTOINETTE_
BY
H. BELLOC
πολυ κρεισσων ἡ αναγκη
WITH THIRTY-ONE ILLUSTRATIONS AND FIVE MAPS
THIRD EDITION
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_First Published_ - _October 14th, 1909_
_Second Edition_ - _January 1910_
_Third Edition_ - _1910_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
_GEORGE WYNDHAM_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
THE eighteenth century, which had lost the appetite for tragedy and
almost the comprehension of it, was granted, before it closed, the most
perfect subject of tragedy which history affords.
The Queen of France whose end is but an episode in the story of the
Revolution stands apart in this: that while all around her were achieved
the principal miracles of the human will, she alone suffered, by an
unique exception, a fixed destiny against which the will seemed
powerless. In person she was not considerable, in temperament not
exalted; but her fate was enormous.
It is profitable, therefore, to abandon for a moment the contemplation
of those great men who recreated in Europe the well-ordered State, and
to admire the exact convergence of such accidents as drew around Marie
Antoinette an increasing pressure of doom. These accidents united at
last: they drove her with a precision that was more than human, right to
her predestined end.
In all the extensive record of her actions there is nothing beyond the
ordinary kind. She was petulant or gay, impulsive or collected,
according to the mood of the moment: acting in everything as a woman of
her temper—red-headed, intelligent and arduous—will always do: she was
moved by changing circumstance to this or that as many million of her
sort had been moved before her. But her chance friendships failed not in
mere disappointments but in ruin; her lapses of judgment betrayed her
not to stumbling but to an abyss; her small, neglected actions matured
unseen and reappeared prodigious in the catastrophe of her life as
torturers to drag her to the scaffold. Behind such causes of misfortune
as can at least be traced in some appalling order there appear, as we
read her history, causes more dreadful because they are mysterious and
unreasoned: ill-omened dates, fortunes quite unaccountable, and
continually a dark coincidence, reawaken in us that native dread of
Destiny which the Faith, after centuries of power, has hardly exorcised.
The business, then, of this book is not to recount from yet another
aspect that decisive battle whereby political justice was recovered for
us all, nor to print once more in accurate sequence the life of a Queen
whose actions have been preserved in the minutest detail, but to show a
Lady whose hands—for all the freedom of their gesture—were moved by
influences other than her own, and whose feet, though their steps seemed
wayward and self-determined, were ordered for her in one path that led
inexorably to its certain goal.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION 1
II. BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 17
III. THE ESPOUSALS 32
IV. THE DU BARRY 45
V. THE DAUPHINE 52
VI. THE THREE YEARS 73
VII. THE CHILDREN 116
VIII. FIGARO 130
IX. THE DIAMOND NECKLACE 154
X. THE NOTABLES 170
XI. THE BASTILLE 193
XII. OCTOBER 215
XIII. MIRABEAU 240
XIV. VARENNES 263
XV. THE WAR 292
XVI. THE FALL OF THE PALACE 307
XVII. THE TEMPLE 324
XVIII. THE HOSTAGE 348
XIX. THE HUNGER OF MAUBEUGE 365
XX. WATTIGNIES 377
APPENDICES 402
INDEX 419
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE LAST ACT OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY. _Frontispiece_
ORDER GIVEN ON 10TH AUGUST, 1792, TO
THE GUARD AT THE TUILERIES TO CEASE
FIRE AND RETURN TO BARRACKS
MARIA THERESA - From the tapestry 13
portrait woven for Marie Antoinette
and recently restored to Versailles
MADAME DE POMPADOUR - From the Portrait 18
by Boucher in the National Gallery,
Edinburgh. From a photo by T. R. Annan
& Sons
THE FIRST DAUPHIN (THE FATHER OF LOUIS 26
XVI.)
LOUIS XVI. - From the principal bust at 70
Versailles
THE EMPEROR JOSEPH II. - From the 103
tapestry portrait woven for Marie
Antoinette and recently restored to
Versailles
MARIE ANTOINETTE - From the principal 117
bust at Versailles
THE COUNTESS OF PROVENCE - From the bust 129
at Versailles
MARIE ANTOINETTE - After the painting by 154
Madame Vigée Le Brun. From photo
kindly lent by Duveen Bros., Old Bond
Street
PORTRAIT BUST OF THE DUKE OF NORMANDY, 163
THE SECOND DAUPHIN, SOMETIMES CALLED
LOUIS XVII., WHO DIED IN THE TEMPLE
AUTOGRAPH NOTE OF LOUIS XVI. RECALLING 213
NECKER, ON THE 16TH OF JULY, AFTER THE
FALL OF THE BASTILLE
THE TUILERIES, FROM THE GARDEN OR WEST 231
SIDE, IN 1789
FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST PAGE OF THE 260
ADDRESS TO THE FRENCH PEOPLE WRITTEN
BY LOUIS XVI. BEFORE HIS FLIGHT
PÉTION 286
BARNAVE 289
FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST PAGE OF THE 297
LETTER WRITTEN ON THE 3RD SEPTEMBER,
1791, BY MARIE ANTOINETTE TO THE
EMPEROR, HER BROTHER, PROPOSING ARMED
INTERVENTION
EAST FRONT OF THE TUILERIES (THE SIDE 314
ATTACKED BY THE MOB) IN ITS LAST STATE
BEFORE THE COMMUNE OF 1871, AFTER THE
CLEARING AWAY OF THE STREETS AND
HOUSES IN FRONT OF IT
AN EARLY VIEW OF THE APPROACH TO THE 322
TUILERIES FROM THE CARROUSEL, SHOWING
THE THREE COURTYARDS
CONTEMPORARY PRINT OF THE FIGHTING IN 327
THE COURTYARD
INSCRIPTION ON THE BROKEN BUST OF THE 329
DAUPHIN. A RELIC OF THE SACK OF THE
PALACE
THE TOWER OF THE TEMPLE AT THE MOMENT OF 333
THE ROYAL FAMILY’S IMPRISONMENT
A ROUGH MINIATURE OF THE PRINCESSE DE 337
LAMBALLE Preserved at the Carnavalet
SANSON’S LETTER ASKING THE AUTHORITIES 343
WHAT STEPS HE IS TO TAKE FOR THE
EXECUTION OF THE KING
AUTOGRAPH DEMAND OF LOUIS XVI. FOR A 344
RESPITE OF THREE DAYS
REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONERS THAT ALL IS 346
DULY ARRANGED FOR THE BURIAL OF LOUIS
CAPET AFTER HIS EXECUTION
FIRST PAGE OF LOUIS XVI.’S WILL 348
ORDER OF THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY 356
IN CAMBON’S HANDWRITING, DIRECTING THE
DAUPHIN TO BE SEPARATED FROM HIS
MOTHER
LAST PORTRAIT OF MARIE ANTOINETTE, BY 365
KOCHARSKI Presumably sketched in the
Temple, and now at Versailles
GATEWAY OF THE LAW COURTS THROUGH WHICH 380
THE QUEEN WENT TO HER DEATH
FIRST PAGE OF MARIE ANTOINETTE’S LAST 395
LETTER
FACSIMILE OF THE DEATH-WARRANT OF MARIE 398
ANTOINETTE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LIST OF MAPS AND PLANS
MAP OF THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES AND THE 263
RETURN
SKETCH MAP OF THE ROAD FROM PARIS TO 267
VARENNES, JUNE 21, 1791
SKETCH MAP TO ILLUSTRATE DROUET’S RIDE 278
ELEMENTS OF THE STRATEGIC POSITION, 359
JULY-OCTOBER, 1793
BATTLE OF WATTIGNIES, OCT. 15 AND 16, 377
1793, AND THE RELIEF OF MAUBEUGE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MARIE ANTOINETTE
CHAPTER I
_THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION_
EUROPE, which carries the fate of the whole world, lives by a life which
is in contrast to that of every other region, because that life, though
intense, is inexhaustible. There is present, therefore, in her united
history a dual function of maintenance and of change such as can be
discovered neither in any one of her component parts nor in
civilisations exterior to her own. Europe alone of all human groups is
capable of transforming herself ceaselessly, not by the copying of
foreign models, but in some creative way from within. She alone has the
gift of moderating all this violent energy, of preserving her ancient
life, and by an instinct whose action is now abrupt, now imperceptibly
slow, of dissolving whatever products of her own energy may not be
normal to her being.
These dual forces are not equally conspicuous: the force that preserves
us is general, popular, slow, silent, and beneath us all; the force that
makes us diversified and full of life shines out in peaks of action.
The agents and the manifestations of the conserving force do not
commonly present themselves as the chief personalities and the most
remarkable events of our long record. The agents and the manifestations
of the force that perpetually transform us are arresting figures, and
catastrophic actions. Those who keep us what we are, for the most part
will never be known—they are millions. Those, on the other hand, who
have brought upon our race its great novelties of mood or of vesture,
the battles they have won, the philosophies they have framed and
imposed, the polities they have called into existence, they and their
works fill history. That power which has forbidden us to perish uses
servants often impersonal or obscure; it is mostly to be discovered at
work in the permanent traditions of the populace, and its effects are
but rarely visible until they appear solid and established by a process
which is rather that of growth than of construction. That power which
keeps the mass moving glitters upon the surface of it and is seen.
There are, nevertheless, in this perennial and hidden task of
maintaining Europe certain exceptional events of which the date is
clear, the result immediate, and the authors conspicuous. Of early
examples the victory of Constantine in the fourth century, the defeat of
Abdul Rhaman in the eighth, may be cited. Among the lesser ones of later
times is a decision which was taken in the middle of the eighteenth
century by the French and Austrian Governments, and to which historians
have given the name of the _Diplomatic Revolution_.
To comprehend or even to follow the career of Marie Antoinette it is
essential to seize the nature and the gravity of that rearrangement of
national forces, for it determined all her life. To the great alliance
between France and Austria by which such a rearrangement was effected
she owed every episode of her drama. Her marriage, her eminence, her
sufferings, and her death were each directly the consequence of that
compact: its conclusion coincided with her birth; from childhood she was
dedicated to it as a pledge, a bond, and, at last, a victim. Though,
therefore, that treaty can occupy but little place in pages which deal
with her vivid life—a life lived after the signing of the document and
after its most noisy consequences had disappeared—yet the instrument
must be grasped at the outset and must remain permanently in the mind of
all who would understand the Queen of France and her disaster; for it
was her mother who made the alliance; the statesman who presided over
all her fortunes planned and achieved it. It stands throughout her forty
years like a fixed horoscope drawn at birth, or a sentence pronounced
and sure to be fulfilled.
The Diplomatic Revolution of the eighteenth century sprang, like every
other major thing in modern history, from the religious schism of the
sixteenth.
If that vast disturbance of the Reformation which threatened so
grievously the culture of Europe, which maimed for ever the life of the
Renaissance, and which is only now beginning to subside, had broken the
national tradition of Gaul as it did that of Britain, it may confidently
be asserted that European civilisation would have perished. There was
not left on the shores of the Mediterranean a sufficient reserve of
energy to re-indoctrinate the West. A welter of small States hopelessly
separated by the violence and self-sufficience of the new philosophy
would each have gone down the roads an individual goes when he forgets
or learns to despise traditional rules of living and the corporate sense
of mankind. That interaction which is the life of Europe would have
disappeared. A short period of intense local activities would have been
followed by a general repose. The unity of the Western world would have
failed, and the spirit of Rome would have vanished as utterly from her
deserted provinces as has that of Assyria from hers.
If, on the other hand, the French had chosen the earliest moment of the
Reformation to lead the popular instinct of Europe against the Reformers
and to re-establish unity, if as early as the reign of Francis I. (who
saw the peril) they had imagined a species of crusade, why, then, the
schism would have been healed by the sword, the humanity of the
Renaissance would have become a permanent influence in our lives rather
than an heroic episode whose vigour we regret but cannot hope to
restore, and the discovery of antiquity, the thorough awakening of the
mind, would have impelled Europe towards new and glorious fortunes the
nature of which we cannot even conjecture, so differently did the course
of history turn. For it so happened that the French—whose temperament,
whose unbroken Roman legend, and whose geographical position made them
the decisive centre of the struggle—the French hesitated for two hundred
years.
Their religion indeed they preserved. The attempt to force upon the
French doctrines convenient, in France as in England, to the wealthy
merchants, the intellectuals and the squires, was met by popular
risings; those of the French, as they were the more sanguinary so were
also the more successful. The first massacre of St. Bartholomew, when
the Catholic leaders were killed in the south, was not forgotten by the
north; and after the second massacre of St. Bartholomew in Paris had
avenged it, the Reformation could never establish in France that
oligarchic polity which it ultimately imposed upon England and Holland.
In a word, the Catholic reaction in France was sufficiently violent to
recover the tradition of the State; but the full consequences of that
reaction did not follow, nor did France support the general Catholic
instinct of Europe outside the French boundaries, because, allied with
the Faith to which the nation was so profoundly attached and had barely
preserved, was the political power of the _Spanish-Austrian Empire_,
which the French nation and its leaders detested and feared.
It is difficult for us to-day to comprehend the might of Spain during
the century of the Reformation, and still more difficult to grasp that
external appearance of overwhelming strength which, as the years
proceeded, tended more and more to exceed her actual (and declining)
power.
The supremacy of Spain over Europe resided in a dynasty and not in a
national idea. It did not take the form of over-riding treaties or of
attempting the partition of weaker States, for it was profoundly
Christian, and it was military; in twenty ways the position of Spain
differed from the hegemony which some modern European State might
attempt to exercise over its fellows. But it is possible to arrive at
some conception of what that Empire was if we remember that it reposed
upon a vast colonial system which Spain alone seemed capable of
conducting with success, that it monopolised the production of gold, and
that it depended upon a command of the sea which was secured to it by an
invincible fleet. To such advantages there must further be added an
armed force not only by far the largest and best trained in Europe, but
mainly composed of the best fighters as well, and—a circumstance more
important than all the rest—an extent of dominion, due to the union of
the Austrian and Spanish houses, which gave to Charles V. and his
successors the whole background, as it were, upon which the map of
Europe was painted: in the sea of that Emperor’s continental
possessions, apart from a few insignificant principalities, France alone
survived—an intact island with ragged boundaries, menaced upon every
side. For the Emperor, then master of the Peninsula, of the Germanies,
and of the New World, was everywhere by sea and almost everywhere by
land a pressing foe.
However much this Spanish-Austrian power might stand (as it did stand)
for European traditions and for the Faith of civilisation which France
had elected to preserve, it was impossible for the French crown and
nation not to be opposed to its political power if that crown and that
nation were to survive. The smaller nations of the North—the English,
the Low Countries, &c.—were in less peril than the French; for these
were now the only considerable exception to, and were soon to be the
rivals of, the Spanish-Austrian State. Had the Armada found fair
weather, Philip might have been crowned at Westminster; but the
English—united, isolated, and already organised as a commercial
oligarchy—would have fought their way out from foreign domination as
thoroughly as did the Dutch. The duty of the French was other; their
independence was not threatened: it was rather their dignity and special
soul which were in peril and which had to be preserved from digestion
into this all-surrounding influence of Spain. To preserve her soul,
France gave—unconsciously, perhaps, as a people, but with acute
consciousness as a government—her whole energies during four
generations. The defence succeeded. Through a dozen such civil tumults
as are native to the French blood, and through a long eclipse of their
national power, they treasured and built up their reserves. After a
century of peril they emerged, under Louis XIV., not only the masters,
but for a moment the very tyrants of Europe.
The French did not achieve this object of theirs without a compromise
odious to their clear spirit. In their secular opposition to the
Spanish-Austrian power, it was the business of their diplomatists to
spare the little Protestant States and to use them as a pack for the
worrying of great Austria, whom they dreaded and would break down. The
constant policy of Henri IV., of Richelieu, of Mazarin, was to
strengthen the Protestant principalities of North Germany, to meet
half-way the rising Puritanism of England, and even at home to tolerate
an organised opulent and numerous body of Huguenots who formed a State
within the State. At a time when it was death to say Mass in England,
the wealthy Calvinist just beyond the Channel—at Dieppe, for
instance—was protected with all the force of the law from the fanaticism
or indignation of his fellow-citizens; he could convene his synods
openly, could hold office at law or in municipal affairs, and was even
granted a special form of representation and a place in the advisory
bodies of the State. All this was done, not to secure internal
order—which would perhaps have been better affirmed in France, as it was
in England, by the vigorous persecution of the minority—but to create a
Protestant make-weight to what appeared till nearly the close of the
seventeenth century the overwhelming menace of the Spanish and Austrian
Houses.
Such was the policy which the French Court wisely pursued during so long
a period that it finally acquired the force of a fixed tradition and
threatened to last on into an era of new conditions, when it would prove
useless or, later, harmful to the State. The general framework of that
Anti-Austrian diplomacy did indeed survive from the latter seventeenth
till the middle of the eighteenth century; but from the time when Louis
XIV. in 1661 began to rule alone, to that final rearrangement of
European forces in the Diplomatic Revolution, which it is my business to
describe, the Catholic powers tended more and more to be conscious of a
common fate and of a common duty. One after another the portions of the
old French diplomatic work fell to pieces as the strength of Spain
diminished and as the small Protestant States advanced in their cycle of
rapid commercial expansion, increasing population and military power;
until, a generation after Louis XIV.’s death, Protestant Europe as a
whole had formed in line against what was left of Rome.
It would not be germane to my subject were I to enter at any length into
the gradual transformation of Europe between 1668 and 1741. That first
date is that of the treaty which closed the last clear struggle between
France and Spain; the second date is that of the first great battle,
Mollwitz, in which Prussia under Frederick the Great appeared as a
triumphant and equal opponent against the Catholic forces of the Empire.
It is enough to say that during that period the results of the great
struggle were solidified. Europe was now hopelessly, and, as it seemed,
finally riven asunder; and those who proposed to continue, those who
proposed to disperse the stream of European tradition, gravitated into
two camps armed for a struggle which is not even yet decided.
The transition may be expressed as the long life of a man—nay, it may be
exactly expressed in the life of _one_ man, Fleury, for he stood on the
threshold of manhood at its commencement and in sight of death at its
close: what such a long life witnessed, between its eighteenth and its
ninetieth year, was—if the vast confusion of detail be eliminated and
the large result be grasped—the confirmation of the great schism and the
final decision of France to stand wholly against the North. There
appeared at last, fixed and consolidated, a Protestant and a Catholic
division in Europe whose opposing philosophies, seen or unseen, denied,
ridiculed or ignored, even by those most steeped in either atmosphere,
were henceforward to affect inwardly every detail of individual life as
outwardly they were to affect every great event in the history of our
race, and every general judgment which has been passed upon its actions.
The Spanish Power, based as it had been not on internal resources but on
a mere naval and colonial supremacy, could not but rapidly decline; it
had long been separated from the German Empire; it was destined to fall
into the orbit of France. On the other hand, the England of the early
eighteenth century was no longer a small community absorbed in
theological discussion; she had become a nation of the first rank, one
that was developing its industries, its wealth, and its armed strength.
She boasted in Marlborough the chief military genius of the age; she was
already the leader in physics; she was about to be the leader in
mechanical science (with all the riches such a leadership would bring),
and she was upon the eve of acquiring a new colonial empire.
In France the privileges of the Huguenots had been withdrawn as the
situation grew precise and clear, and the breach between them and the
nation was made final by their active and zealous treason in whatever
foreign fleets or armies were attempting the ruin of their country. In
England it had been made plain that the oligarchy, and the nation upon
which it reposed, would admit neither a strong central government nor
the presence of the Catholic Church near any seat of power: the Stuart
dynasty had been exiled; its first attempt at a restoration had been
crushed.
Meanwhile there was preparing a final argument which should compel men
to recognise the clean and fixed division of Europe: that argument was
the astonishing rise of Prussia, for with the appearance upon the field
of this new and strange force—an own child of the Reform—it was evident
that something had changed in the very morals of war.
When Austria was at her weakest, when the French Court, bewildered but
weakly constant to a now meaningless diplomatic habit, was watching the
apparent dissolution of the Empire and was ready to urge its armies
against Vienna, when England remained, and that only from opposition to
the Bourbons, the only support of the Hapsburgs, there was established
within five years the permanent strength of Frederick the Great and the
new factor of Prussian Power: a complete contempt for the old rules of
honour in negotiation and for the old rules of contract in dynastic
relations had been crowned by a complete success.
This advent, when every exception and cross-influence is forgotten, will
remain the chief moral and, therefore, the chief political fact of the
eighteenth century. By the end of the year 1745, Silesia was finally
abandoned by Austria; the Prussian soldier and his atheist theory had
compassed the first mere conquest of European territory which had been
achieved by any European Power since first Europe had been organised
into a family of Christian communities. It had been advanced for the
first time that Europe was not one, but that some unit of it might
overbear and rule another by arms alone; that there was no common
standard nor any unseen avenger upon appeal. That theory had appealed to
arms and had conquered.
Within three years the international turmoil, of which this catastrophe
was immeasurably the greatest result, was subjected to a sort of
settlement. One of those general committees of all Europe with which our
own time is so familiar was summoned to Aix-la-Chapelle; representatives
of the various Powers confirmed or modified the results of a group of
wars, and in the autumn of 1748 affixed their signatures to a complete
arrangement which was well known to be unstable, ephemeral, and
insincere, but which was yet of tremendous import, for it marked (though
in no dramatic manner) the end of an old world.
As the plenipotentiaries left their accomplished work and strolled out
of the room which had received them, they were still grouped together by
such weak and complex ties as the interests of individual governments
might decide. When they met again after the next brief cycle of war,
these men were arranged in a true order and sat opposing: for England,
Prussia, and experiment of schism on the one side; for the belt of
endurance on the other. Since that cleavage these two prime bodies,
disguised under a hundred forms and hidden and confused by a welter of
incidental and secondary forces, have remained opposing, attempting with
fluctuating success each to determine the general fortunes of the world.
They will so continue balanced and opposing until perhaps—by the action
of some power neither of war nor of diplomacy—unity may be
re-established and Europe again may live.
Of the men who so strolled out of the room at Aix one only, still young,
had grasped in silence the necessity of the great change; he saw that
Vienna and Paris must in the next struggle stand together and defend
together their common civilisation and their resisting Faith. He not
only perceived the advent of this great reversal in the traditions of
the chanceries; he designed to aid it himself, to mould it and to
determine its character. That he could then perceive of how large a
movement his action was to be a part no historian can pretend, for at
the time no one could grasp more than the momentary issue, and this
man’s very profession made it necessary for him, as for every other
diplomat, to see clearly immediate things and to abandon distant
speculation. But though his work was greater than himself and far
greater than his intention, yet he deserves a very particular attention;
for this young man of thirty-six was _Kaunitz_, and he, for a whole
generation, was Austria.
In so determining to effect an alliance between the Hapsburgs and their
secular enemy, Kaunitz equally determined, unknown to himself, the whole
fortunes of Marie Antoinette; she, years later, when she came to be born
to the Imperial house, was, even in childhood, the pledge he needed. It
is Kaunitz who stands forever behind the life of Marie Antoinette, like
a writer behind the creature in his book. It is he who designs her
marriage, who uses her without mercy for the purposes of his policy at
Versailles; he is the author of her magnificence and of her intrigue; he
is then also indirectly the author of her fall, which, in his obscure
and failing old age, he heard of far away, partially comprehended, and
just survived.
Kaunitz was the original of our modern diplomatists. In that epoch of
governing families not a few nobles were flattered to be called “the
Coachmen of Europe”: he alone merited the cant term. He served a
sovereign whose armies were constantly defeated; he was the adviser of a
mere crown—and that crown worn by a woman; in a time when the divergent
races of the Danube were first astir, he had at his command or for his
support neither a national tradition nor any strong instrument of war,
yet, by personal genius, by tenacity, and by a wide lucidity of vision,
he discovered and completed a method of “government through foreign
relations” which was almost independent of national feeling or of armed
strength.
An absence of natural violence, as of all common emotions, was
characteristic of Kaunitz. He disdained the vulgar pomp of silence; he
talked continually; he knew the strength and secrecy of men who can be
at once verbose and deliberate. Nor could his fluency have deceived any
careful observer into a suspicion of weakness, for his curved thin nose
and prominent peaked chin, his arched eyebrows, his Sclavonic type,
ready and courageous, his hard, pale eyes, showed nothing but purpose
and execution; and as his tall figure stalked round the billiard tables
at evening, his very recreation seemed instinct with plans.
The abounding energy which drove him to success revealed itself in a
thousand ways, and chiefly in this, that in the career of diplomacy,
where all individuality is regarded with dread, _he_ pushed his personal
tastes beyond the eccentric. Thus he had a mania against all
gesticulation, and he would present at every conference the singular
spectacle of a man chattering and disputing unceasingly and eagerly, yet
keeping his hands quite motionless all the while. Again, when he entered
the great houses of Europe and dined with men to influence whom was to
conduct the world, he did not hesitate to bring with him his own
dessert, which when he had eaten he would, to the great disgust of
embassies, elaborately wash his teeth at table. In the midst of the
hardest toil he was so foppish as to wear various wigs—now brown, now
white, now auburn. He was a constant traveller, familiar with every
capital in Western Europe, yet he so loathed fresh air that he would not
pass from his carriage to a palace door unless his mouth were covered.
He was a dandy who, in drawing-rooms loaded with scent and flowers,
loudly protested against all perfume; a gentleman who, when cards were
the only pastime of the rich, expressed a detestation of all hazard; a
courtier who, amidst all the extravagancies of etiquette of the
eighteenth century, barely bowed to the greatest sovereigns, and who, on
the stroke of eleven, would abruptly leave the Emperor without a word.
Such marks of an intense initiative, detachment, and pride were
tolerated in the earlier part of his life with amusement on account of
the affection he could inspire; later they were regarded with ill ease,
and at last with a sort of awe, when it was known that his intelligence
could entrap no matter what combination of antagonists. This
intelligence, and the single devotion by which such natures are
invariably compelled, were both laid at the feet of Maria Theresa.
He was older than his Empress by some seven years; there lay between
them just that space which makes for equality and comprehension between
a man and a woman. The year of her marriage had coincided with that of
his own; he had come at twenty-five to the court of this young sovereign
of eighteen. She had recognised—with a wisdom that never failed her long
and active life—how just and general was his view of Europe, and it was
from this moment that her interests and her career were entrusted to his
genius. He had already studied in three universities, had refused the
clerical profession to which his Canonry of Munster introduced him, and
had travelled in the Netherlands, in France, in England, and in Italy,
where he was made Aulic Councillor, and enfeoffed, as it were, to the
palace.
His abilities had not long to await their opportunity. It was but four
years after Maria Theresa’s marriage and his own that she succeeded to
the throne and possessions of the Hapsburgs: then it was the sudden
advent of Prussia, to which I have alluded, began the great change.
Maria Theresa’s succession was in doubt, not in point of right, but
because her sex and the condition in which her father had left his army
and his treasury gave an opportunity to the rivals of Austria, and
notably to France.
Europe was thus passing through one of those crises of instability
during which every chancery discounts and yet dreads a universal war,
when the magazine was fired by one who had nothing to lose but honour.
Frederick of Prussia was the warmest in acknowledging the title of Maria
Theresa; he accepted her claims, guaranteed the integrity of her
possessions, and suddenly invaded them.
From the ordering of that march of Frederick’s into Silesia—from the
close, that is, of the year 1740—Kaunitz, a man not yet in his thirtieth
year, was at work to repair the Empire and to restore the equilibrium of
Europe. Upon the whole he succeeded; for though the magnitude of the
Revolutionary Wars has dwarfed his period, and though the complete
modern transformation of society has made such causes seem remote, yet
(as it is the thesis of these pages to maintain) Kaunitz unconsciously
preserved the unity of Europe.
In the beginning of the struggle he had already saved the interests of
Maria Theresa in the petty Italian courts. At Florence, at Rome, at
Turin, at Brussels, his mastery continued to increase. In his
thirty-sixth year he was ambassador to London—he concluded, as we have
seen, the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle; by his fortieth he had been
appointed to Paris, and that action by which he will chiefly be
remembered had begun. He had seen, as I have said, the necessity for an
alliance between the two great Catholic Powers. Within the two years of
his residence in Paris he had successfully raised the principle of such
a revolution in policy and as successfully maintained its secrecy. A
task which would have seemed wholly vain had he communicated it to
others, one which would have seemed impossible even to those whom he
might have convinced, was achieved. To his lucid and tenacious intellect
the matter in hand was but the bringing forth of a tendency already in
existence; he saw the Austro-French alliance lying potentially in the
circumstances of his time; his business was but to define and realise
it.
In such a mood did he take up the Austrian Embassy in Paris. He was well
fitted for the work he had conceived. The magnificence which he
displayed in his palace in the French capital was calculated indeed to
impress rather than to attract the formal court of Versailles; that
magnificence was the product of his personal tastes rather than of his
power of intrigue, but the details of his over-ostentatious household
were well suited to those whom he had designed to capture. The French
language was his own; Italian, though he spoke it well, was foreign to
him; the German dialects he knew but ill and hardly used at all. His
habits were French, to the end of his long life French literature was
his only reading, and his clothes, to their least part, must come from
the hands of the French.
[Illustration:
MARIA THERESA
FROM THE TAPESTRY PORTRAIT WOVEN FOR MARIE ANTOINETTE AND RECENTLY
RESTORED
TO VERSAILLES
]
He moved, therefore, in that world of Paris and Versailles (as did,
later, his pupil, Mercy-d’Argenteau) rather as a native than a
foreigner. Even if the alliance had been as artificial as it was
natural, he would have carried his point. As it was, he left Paris in
1753 to assume the Prime Ministry at Vienna with the certitude that,
when next Frederick of Prussia had occasion to break his word, the
wealth and the arms of the Bourbons would be ranged upon the Austrian
side.
Upon that major pivot all the schemes of Vienna must turn at his
dictation. Every marriage must be contrived so as to fall in with the
projected alliance; every action must be subordinated to the arrangement
which would prove, as he trusted, the supreme hope of the dynasty. To
this one project he directed every power within him or beneath his hand,
and to this he was ready, when the time should come, to sacrifice the
fortunes of any member of the Royal House save its sovereign or its
heir. To this aspect of Europe, long before the termination of his
mission in Paris, he had not so much persuaded as formed the mind of
Maria Theresa.
The great and salutary soul of that woman explains in part what were to
be the fortunes of her youngest child. Not that Marie Antoinette
inherited either the opportunities or the full excellence of her mother,
but that there ran through the impatient energy and unfruitful
graciousness of the Queen of France a flavour of that which had lent a
disciplined power and a conscious dignity to the middle age of Maria
Theresa.
The body of the Empress was strong. Its strength enabled her to bear
without fatigue the ceaseless work of her office, and in the midst of
child-bearing to direct with exactitude the affairs of a troubled State.
That strength of hers was evident in her equal temper, her rapid
judgment, her fixed choice of men; it was evident also in her firm tread
and in her carriage, and even as she sat upon a chair at evening she
seemed to be governing from a throne.
A growing but uniform capacity informed her life. She had known the
value not only of industry but also of enthusiasm, and had saved her
throne in its greatest peril by her sudden and passionate appeal to the
Hungarians. It was this instinctive science of hers that had disarmed
Kaunitz. If he allowed her to suggest what he had already determined, if
he permitted her to be the first to write down the scheme of the
Diplomatic Revolution he had conceived, and to send it down to history
as her creation rather than his own, it was not the desire to flatter
her that moved him but a recognition of her due. She it was that sent
him to Paris and she that superintended the weaving of the loom he had
arranged.
Her dark and pleasing eyes, sparkling and strong, controlled him in so
far as he was controlled by any outer influence, for he recognised in
them the Cæsarian spirit.
Her largeness pleased him. When she played at cards, she played for
fortunes; when she rode, she rode with magnificence; when she sang, her
voice, though high, was loud, untrammelled, and full; when she drove
abroad, it was with splendour and at a noble turn of speed.
All this was greatly to the humour of Kaunitz, and he continued to serve
his Empress with a zeal he would never have given to a mere ambition. In
deference to her, all that he could control of his idiosyncrasies he
controlled. His great bull-dog, which followed him to every other door,
was kept from her palace. His abrupt speech, his failure to reply, his
sudden and brief commands—all his manner—were modified in consultation
with his Queen. She, on her part, knew what were the limits to which so
singular a nature could proceed in the matter of self-denial. She
respected half his follies, and her servants often saw her from the
courtyard shutting the windows, smiling, as he ran from his carriage,
his mouth covered to screen it from the outer air. Her common sense and
poise forgave in _him_ alone extravagances she had little inclination to
support in others. He respected in _her_ those depths of emotion, of
simplicity, and of faith which in others he would have regarded as
imbecilities ready for his high intelligence to use at will.
It was neither incomprehensible to him nor displeasing that her temper
should be warmer than his intelligence demanded. The increasing strength
of her religion, the personal affections and personal distastes which
she conceived, above all, the closeness of her devotion to her husband,
completed, in the eyes of Kaunitz, a character whose dominions and
dynasty he chose to serve and to confirm; for he perceived that what
others imagined to be impediments to her policy were but the reflection
of her sex and of her health therein.
Kaunitz saw in Frederick of Prussia a player of worthy skill. It was
upon the death of that soldier that he gave vent to the one emotional
display of his life; yet he permitted Maria Theresa to hate her rival
with a hatred which was not directed against his campaigning so much as
against the narrow intrigue and bitterness of his evil mind.
To Kaunitz, again, Catherine of Russia was nothing but a powerful rival
or ally; yet he approved that Maria Theresa should speak of her as one
speaks of the women of the streets, despising her not for her ambition
but for her licence.
To Kaunitz, Francis of Lorraine, the husband of the Empress, was a thing
without weight in the international game; yet he saw with a general
understanding, and was glad to see in detail, the security of the
imperial marriage.
The singular happiness of Maria Theresa’s wedded life was due to no
greatness in Francis of Lorraine, but to his vivacity and good breeding,
to his courtesy, to his refinement, and especially to his devotion. It
suited her that he should ride and shoot so well. She loved the
restrained intonation of his voice and the frankness of his face. She
easily forgave his numerous and passing infidelities. The simplicity of
his religion was her own, for her goodness was all German as his
sincerity was all Western and French; upon these two facets the opposing
races touch when the common faith introduces the one to the other. Their
household, therefore, was something familiar and domestic. Its language
was French, of a sort, because French was the language of Francis; but
while he brought the clarity of Lorraine under that good roof, which
covered what Goethe called “the chief bourgeois family of Germany,” he
brought to it none of the French hardness and precision, nor any of that
cold French parade which was later to exasperate his daughter when she
reigned at Versailles. He was a man who delighted in visits to his
country-side, and who would have his carriage in town wait its turn with
others at the opera doors.
Maria Theresa was so wedded, served by such a Minister, in possession of
and in authority over such a household during those seven years between
the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle and the French Alliance, between 1748 and
1755. These seven years were years of patience and of diplomacy, which
were used to retrieve the disasters of her first bewildered struggle
against Prussia and the new forces of Europe. They were the seven years
of profound, if precarious, international peace, when England was
preparing her maritime supremacy, Prussia her full military tradition,
the French monarchy, in the person of Louis XV., its rapid dissolution
through excess and through fatigue. They were the seven years which
seemed to the superficial but acute observation of Voltaire to be the
happiest of his age: a brief “Antonine” repose in which the arts
flourish and ideas might flower and even grow to seeding. They were the
seven years in which the voice of Rousseau began to be heard and in
which was written the _Essay upon Human Inequality_.
For the purposes of this story they were in particular the seven years
during which Kaunitz, now widowed, working first as ambassador in Paris,
then as Prime Minister by the side of Maria Theresa at Vienna, achieved
that compact with the Bourbons which was to restore the general
traditions of the Continent and the fortunes of the House of Hapsburg.
The period drew to a close: the plans for the alliance were laid, the
last discussions were about to be engaged, when it was known, in the
early summer of 1755, that the Empress was again with child.
------------------------------------------------------------------------