The Books: Marie Antoinette: The Journey, by Antonia Fraser

Daily Book Excerpt: Biography

Next biography on the biography shelf is Marie Antoinette: The Journey, by Antonia Fraser

Or consider that unutterable business of the Diamond Necklace. Red-hatted Cardinal Louis de Rohan; Sicilian jailbird Balsamo Cagliostro; milliner Dame de Lamotte, “with a face of some piquancy”: the highest Church Dignitaries waltzing, in Walpurgis Dance, with quack-prophets, pickpurses and public women; — a whole Satan’s Invisible World dipsplayed; working there continually under the daylight visible one; the smoke of its torment going up for ever! The Throne has been brought into scandalous collision with the Treadmill. Astonished Europe rings with the mystery for ten months; sees only lie unfold itself from lie; corruption among the lofty and the low, gulosity, credulity, imbecility, strength nowhere but in the hunger. Weep, fair Queen, they first tears of unmixed wretchedness! Thy fair name has been tarnished by foul breath; irremediably while life lasts. No more shalt thou be loved and pitied by living hearts, till a new generation has been born, and thy own heart lies cold, cured of all its sorrows. — The Epigrams henceforth become not sharp and bitter; but cruel, atrocious, unmentionable. On that 31st of May, 1786, a miserable Cardinal Grand-Almoner Rohan, on issuing from his Bastille, is escorted by hurrahing crowds: unloved he, and worthy of no love; but important since the Court and Queen are his enemies.

— Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, 1837

This dame gets a bum rap.

This book was a total eye-opener. My study of the French Revolution mainly came through a strictly American context (and English context). I know about the Founding Fathers’ differing viewpoints on what was going on in France, I know about the rift between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail Adams due to a couple of crucial letters they exchanged during the height of the Terror – Jefferson was all “for”, Abigail was horrified – and Edmund Burke’s book on the French Revolution (Reflections on the Revolution in France) solidified for me many of my own political views, put into such bracing and angry language, but never less than brilliantly eloquent. Burke’s book has never been topped as a statement of what revolution is, what revolution should be, what it should not be. I always think of Edmund Burke’s book (which I not only highly recommend, but put it on a level with Machiavelli in terms of a statement of political theory – it’s one of the most important political books ever written). Burke, an Irishman, was one of the few supporters of the American revolution in England, and when the events exploded in France a decade later, the entire world watched in hope and then horror at the events. To say that the French Revolution was a mirror image of the American Revolution is correct – in that everything went backwards. The old world was not accepted or incorporated into the new order, but burned away in a series of murderous purges, something that decidedly did NOT occur in America. The differences between the stated American ideals of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and the French ideals of “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” is instructive. Thomas Jefferson’s terminology (with a little editing help from Benjamin Franklin) elevates the American discourse to the transcendent – the “pursuit of happiness”? For real? For all of us? Early drafts had limited it to people of property, but in the final document, no limitations are put on who deserves to have “the pursuit of happiness”. Slavery is another complicated topic, something Jefferson had tried to blame entirely on George III in his earliest draft, but the Southern delegates made him take it out. So the Declaration leaves the question open. Of course that led the way to the Civil War – but that is part of the mess (in a good way) that the phrase” pursuit of happiness” suggests. There is nothing that says that MY “pursuit of happiness” may not interfere with YOUR “pursuit of happiness”. Everyone pursuing their own happiness is bound to run into conflict. The conflict is built into the ideals. In that one magical phrase, the American experiment was launched, for better or for worse. It will necessarily be messy, the “pursuit of happiness”, and the mess was incorporated into the American experiment (now THAT is truly revolutionary), and we have been making messes, cleaning up our messes, making messes again, since then. But “liberty, equality, brotherhood” is another sentiment entirely, which suggests a requirement of sameness, a leveling sentiment – which certainly played out in the French Revolution. The aristocrats will be pulled down to the level of the peasantry – a disastrous choice, since the aristocrats, pampered as they were, were often the only ones in the society who had any idea about how to do anything. Put peasants in charge, without the necessary and sometimes slow development of a working middle-class, and you have yourself a disaster. (Cue: Russian Revolution.) “Liberty, equality, brotherhood” is a dangerous sentiment, then, although it certainly swept away the minds of intelligent men who found it attractive. Edmund Burke was cooler-headed about it, and he saw the leveling that was going on in France and decried it for the monstrosity that it was. The French Revolution burned itself out in purge after purge, the revolution eating its young (something Charles Dickens describes so accurately in his portrayal of the Lafarge couple in Tale of Two Cities), which decimated the country, leaving it wide open for a dictator to stroll in and preserve order and pride again. Welcome, Napoleon. None of this occurred in America.

As you can see, my perspective is entirely American. I know about the French Revolution, who the hell doesn’t, and I read Thomas Carlyle’s giant fascinating book about it (another must-read, although it took me a good dogged 2 years to finally finish it). It is one of the defining moments of the 18th century, certainly one of the most important events ever to take place on the world stage.

Antonia Fraser’s book about Marie Antoinette, then, was a total revelation to me. I know about the politics, and I know about all the players. My concerns and interests are often male-dominated. I like the clash of politics. It’s one of my passions. Marie Antoinette was obviously an extremely important figure, and became the focal point of much of the rage of the populace in France. Thomas Carlyle’s book (which pulses with outrage) goes into it quite a bit, especially the Diamond Necklace affair – which brought scandal inside Versailles, smearing the Queen’s name, and leaving her open to attack. These are political events. But Marie Antoinette, as a figure in her own right, what about her? She of the “let them eat cake” bromide. I never really bought that she said that, and I also never believed she was some evil woman. She certainly didn’t deserve to be executed. But to learn of her background, in Fraser’s beautiful and very sad book, was an eye-opener. This is the only book of Antonia Fraser’s I have read. I know she is widely respected for her biographies, and her Marie Antoinette book certainly made me curious to read more. The same was obviously true for Sofia Coppola!

A compelling and heartbreaking story, this young Archduchess of Austria married to the Dauphin of France when she was just a teenager, a pampered little girl, really, who had no idea what kind of mess she would be strolling into. Completely unprepared for the decadent intrigues of French court life, she desperately tried to keep herself afloat. Alone in the world. That is my real impression after reading the book. Wow, she had to be the loneliest person in the world. The marriage was a political one, engineered by Austria and France. Austria, a warring nation, had dragged France into the Seven Years War and France had been defeated by England. Because of the bad feelings towards Austria already, the French population did not take kindly to Marie Antoinette. They saw her as a foreigner, who had designs on France as a whole.

Their marriage took place in the spotlight of the French court, and Fraser makes all of that palpably real. The book is strictly from Marie Antoinette’s point of view, and because she has been such a reviled figure for centuries, it is quite bracing to actually read about the goings-on and what she had to put up with. Louis was impotent, he refused to consummate the union. YEARS passed, making the couple into an open source of mockery. Finally, they had a baby, but the damage to their reputations were already done. It’s not just one thing that brought down the monarchy, it was a host of many things (and you have to wonder what France, a monarchy, was thinking, in providing such essential aid to the American colonies in overthrowing THEIR king. Obviously, they hated England to such a degree they would do anything to humiliate her – but seriously, France? You don’t think the overthrow of your hated rival won’t give your own population some ideas about YOUR monarchy?) France was a decadent society, run by priests and gossips, and Marie Antoinette, a good girl, sheltered and wanting to do her best, was constitutionally unfit for such an environment.

It’s been years since I read the book, but I remember tearing through it. Fraser isn’t famous for nothing. Her prose is engaging, intelligent, and her research is impeccable. As the events heated up around the lonely monarchs, Fraser was able to construct that feeling of almost inevitable doom that had to have come over them. There was no escape. They were puppets in the grand scheme of things, symbols that had to be destroyed.

Louis XVI is the only king to have ever been executed in France. The Revolution pretty much played out just as Edmund Burke said it would. The revolutionaries of the first round found themselves losing their heads in the second round, and those second-round executioners found themselves on the chopping block by another, even more rigid group. I can only imagine what it must have been like to live at that time, and waiting for the newspapers for the latest dispatches. When a Revolution becomes about its SYMBOLS rather than about actual goals and dreams … that’s when you’ve got to worry. Symbols are important, but they are not all. Destroying the symbols of power does nothing to ensure a safe future for the revolutionary ideals (Edmund Burke’s point all along – only no one wanted to hear it, so swept away were they by the ideas of “liberty, equality, and brotherhood”). Brotherhood, my ass. Your brother there is gonna chop off your head tomorrow. People cannot be leveled into sameness. You can try, but you will fail. It will backfire. You’ll be next.

Marie Antoinette is a casualty of all of this. I really felt for the dame when I read the book.

A bum rap.

While Fraser’s chapters on the growing threat to the monarchy are masterful, I’ll excerpt a bit about Marie Antoinette’s beginning days at Versailles. It gives you a good feel for the level of detail Fraser is able to effortlessly convey.

Excerpt from Marie Antoinette: The Journey, by Antonia Fraser

Marie Antoinette’s own account of her daily routine, written to her mother in July 1770, makes it clear that this constant element of the private-performed-in-public was present from the very beginning. Waking between nine and ten, she would dress informally, say her morning prayers, eat breakfast, and after that visit the royal aunts. “At eleven o’clock I have my hair done. At noon, all the world can enter – I put on my rouge and wash my hands in front of the whole world. Then the gentlemen leave and the ladies remain and I am dressed in front of them.” This was followed by Mass, with the King if he happened to be at Versailles, otherwise with the Dauphin. After Mass the two of them dined together “in front of the whole world”.

In many ways the young Marie Antoinette, with her grace and amiability, was well equipped to play the part of a hieratic figure at Versailles. The Dauphine certainly had nothing to fear from being exposed to the whole world, morally or physically. At this point she accepted all the conventions of the role, to be played on the stage of what was, in essence, an ageing court. The earlier deaths of the Dauphine Maria Josepha and of the Queen meant that the fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette was the First Lady of Versailles from the start. In effect, a generation had been skipped. There were courtiers present whose experience stretched back half a century, and even in one or two cases still longer to the last days of Louis XIV. The old man who as a boy had accidentally set light to the wig of the great monarch as he tried to guide his passage with a candle still trembled at the memory. The Duc de Richelieu, widely thought to be the original of Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, had been born in the previous century, and in the words of the Comte d’Hezecques, who had been his page, the roses of love and the laurels of glory had been showered on him throughout three reigns (as well as a few other less admiring accolades).

Then there were various old ladies, described by the Prince de Ligne as impressive like the ruins of Rome and gracious like classical Athens. The ageing Marechale de Mirepoix, for example, was so charming “that you would imagine that she had thought of nothing but you for the whole of her life.” It would be a great mistake to underestimate the power of the old at Versailles, especially the older women. For all the sentimental attachment to the fresh appearance of youth – possessed so markedly by the Dauphine – prestige did not vanish with the first wrinkles. A woman was generally held to grow old at thirty, or at least lose the seduction of her beauty (although the bal des vieux at court was actually for women over twenty-seven). Louis Petit de Bachaumont, author of numerous volumes of anecdotal reminiscence, put the masculine point of view crudely enough when he repeated a contemporary saying: a girl of fifteen was a coffer whose lock had to be forced, while a woman of thirty was “venison well ripe and good to put on the spit”. After that a forty-year-old woman was “a great bastion where the cannon had made more than a breach” and at fifty “an old lantern in which one only places a wick with regret.”

However, the bastions and the lanterns had, from the feminine point of view, lost neither their strength of character nor their influence with the passing of time. The mocking, mischievous spirit that Madame Antoine had developed in Austria to cope with her own fears of older, cleverer women, was going to be inappropriate at Versailles. Nicknaming the Comtesse de Noailles “Madame Etiquette” and sending to know the correct procedure for a Dauphine of France who had fallen off her donkey was amusing enough for Marie Antoinette. Such levity was understandable in a girl. “At the age of fifteen she laughed much,” wrote the Prince de Ligne. But it was perilous laughter.

Where court conventions were concerned, however, Marie Antoinette was for the time being completely docile. With her natural dexterity, she could manage with ease the cumbersome court dress with its wide hoops and long train, and the famous “Versailles glide,” by which ladies seemingly moved without their feet touching the ground, their satin slippers mysteriously avoiding the dirt, was something of which she would become the supreme exponent. For lesser mortals, the glide was practical tool by this means ladies avoided stepping on the train of the lady in front of them. There were two other practices that symbolized the courtly way of life. First was the essential powdering of the hair. So all-embracing was this practice – in 1770 you could not come to court without it – that the smell of powder (and the pomatum that was applied first to fix it) became one of the pervading perfumes of eighteenth-century Versailles, remembered long afterwards by those who had been there. Huge capes had to be draped round those in court dress, men and women, while the powder was blown on to their coiffures; Louis XVI would need a vast peignoir. But these monstrous edifices of wool, tow, pads and wire, looking as if they had been “dipped in a meal-tub” (in the words of Eliza Hancock, Jane Austen’s cousin), that were so often identified with Marie Antoinette actually predated her and were already part of the normal usage of Versailles.

The second symbolic practice was the lavish application of rouge to the cheeks: not delicate shading but huge precise circles of a colour not far from scarlet. Casanova believed that rouge emphasized ladies’ eyes and indicated “amorous fury,” while widows like Maria Teresa and the Dauphine Maria Josepha gave up wearing it as a measure of austerity. In the case of Marie Antoinette, with her superb complexion, it still had to be formally applied every morning in front of “the whole world”. Rouge, however, was not worn at Versailles in order to allure. It was a badge, or rather two badges, of rank and distinction. It was for this reason that the market-women, who ignored the prohibition on those outside court using rouge, made themselves look like “raddled old dolls,” according to Madame Vigee Le Brun, in an attempt to ape the great ladies; by 1780 French women were said to use 2 million pots of rouge a year.

Visitors from other courts were often appalled by what they saw; in the 1760s Leopold Mozart thought the aristocratic French women looked like wooden Nuremberg dolls on account of this “detestable makeup … unbearable to the eyes of an honest German.” The Emperor Joseph II was equally scathing; he would mock his little sister for her grotesque appearance. In wearing her rouge, however (and spending a great deal of money on it; rouge was so expensive that poorer people used red wine to stain their cheeks) Marie Antoinette was for the time being loyally observing the convention for Versailles, even if it made her unbearable to German eyes.