Culture&Stuff’s very first guest post, by Nancy Carol James, PhD

French culture in the 17th century demonstrated an amazing energy for spiritual and religious questions. One great genius from this time, the mathematician Blaise Pascal, pondered the question, what is a human being in the infinite? In other words, what is a human being who touches the divine? Building on this question, others thinkers wondered if this was possible while still alive on earth? If so, a living person who touches the infinity of God would be a different human being.

For as we all know, participation in religious ceremonies does not necessarily signify spiritual integrity. Many people believe a catechism out of duty, responsibility, tradition or social prestige. Pascal recognized, though, at times a mystical person finds all his or her powers of the mind, heart and soul intimately involved with God. Indeed, Pascal himself believed that he encountered the living God in his life. During his unexpected experience, Pascal grabbed paper and quickly described it as he wrote, “Fire, Fire, Fire! Not the god of the philosopher, but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

Another such person in Pascal’s own era in France also tried to describe her experience of the infinity of God. This happened in the mysterious life of Madame Jeanne Guyon (1648-1717). A profound thinker, Jeanne Guyon wrote eloquent books and poems describing what she called her union with God. Though some denied the truth of her words, the very evidence of her life and accomplishments gave pause to the criticism. Now in the 21st century, many scholars look upon Guyon’s words as powerfully prophetic yet still a puzzling mystery.

Born into an aristocratic family living in the town of Montargis on the Loire River, Jeanne knew deep sorrow at a young age. Both of Jeanne’s parents, Claude Bouvier de la Mothe and Jeanne le Maistre de la Maisonfort, had children from a previous marriage. From an early age, Jeanne knew a conflicted blended family with constant friction between the siblings. At a young age, Jeanne already sought solace in prayer and spiritual reading. Jeanne’s parents planned her education as occasional years spent in nunneries and she found a strong comfort from the presence of some nuns, including her paternal sister who was a dedicated nun, Marie de St. Cecile Bouvier.

Yet Jeanne seemed surrounded by a sense of destiny that others recognized. At the age of eight, the Queen Consort of England, Henriette Marie de France (1609-1669) visited Jeanne’s family and asked to take Jeanne back to England to be in the royal court. Even while recognizing the many social benefits this would have given Jeanne, her parents refused this proposed adoption.

As a girl, Jeanne believed she had a vocation as a nun. Her parents denied her fervent requests; at the age of twelve Jeanne forged her mother’s signature and ran away to the Visitation Convent, a religious community founded by Jane de Chantal. Even though the mother superior in charge of the order wished to allow Jeanne to join, she feared the wrath of Jeanne’s influential father and sent the chastened girl home again.

To compensate for being barred from the nunnery, Jeanne read all of the saints avidly, especially Francis de Sales, Jane de Chantal, and Teresa of Avila. She felt Jane de Chantal’s passion for Jesus when this saint enthusiastically declared “Live Jesus!” Indeed, young Jeanne made a note reading, “Live Jesus!” and placed it on to her skin under her clothing in imitation of Jane de Chantal and her close friend, Francis de Sales.

Jeanne’s hope to “Live Jesus!” also included Francis de Sales’ unusual idea of spiritual annihilation. Francis de Sales went to great lengths to describe this, saying that a small number of believers know the annihilation of their natural personality so that they may experience a resurrected and spiritual unity with God.

In his spiritual classic On the Love of God, de Sales described annihilation in a narrative. On the Greek town of Sestos, a young girl tenderly cared for an orphaned eaglet. After the magnificent bird’s growth to adulthood, the eagle would leave to hunt during the day and that evening bring his prey home to please the girl. One day the eagle left for the day and suddenly the girl fell sick and died.

As the custom specified, on the same day her grieving family began to burn her in a funeral pyre. They built a raging fire and placed the dead girl’s body in the flames. At that moment, the dedicated eagle came flying back, looking for his sweet friend. The immense bird saw the girl’s body being consumed by flames and in deep sorrow he dove down to save the girl. In the intense heat of the flames, he beat his immense wings in a vain attempt to save her. After the fire began to envelop him as well, the eagle chose to stay and die with his friend. The girl and eagle, consumed simultaneously by flames, became eternally united in love.

Francis de Sales explained the metaphor. As the eagle joined with the girl, so in annihilation, the soaring eagle of God unites with the humble person. The person, lost in chaos, fully and suddenly find the refreshing updrafts of immense, transcendent power, through the bonding with the divine eagle. The eagle and the human soar and float together.

After annihilation, the person knows spiritual power like an interior eagle. In this metaphor, the magnificent bird floats free to go higher to commune with the totality of creation. Together the eagle and human rise to catch a glimpse of the One God, while enjoying the whole and sublime beauty of creation.

This idea of annihilation captivated Jeanne and took root in her soul. Calling this divinization, Jeanne wanted this union with all her heart and called this annihilation and subsequent union a consummated marriage. In this fulfilled state, the person may soar through prayer into new heights, while still remaining fully human.

The annihilation of love became a theme of Jeanne’s, along with others who also treasured this hope. Jeanne understood the process of annihilation as love that carries faithful people to places of suffering, a place that offers many blessings if it is not rejected. She noted the possible annihilations in many dedicated relationships: the faithful parent nurses the sick child, the committed priest cares for his parish, and the fervent believer cares for the poor. As the believer serves others, the divine joins with the human, and the two, the human and the divine, become as one.

For the youthful Jeanne learned from her reading of the saints that the greatest mystery of human life happens when love between a human being and the divine makes them as one. In this grace-filled blending, the greatest suffering as well as the greatest fulfillment spring up. The person, a nothing as Jeanne called herself, and Christ, the all in all, meet with a passionate, fiery love enveloping them together.

Jeanne’s parents seemed to fear her passion for God and attempted to stop this by arranging a marriage. Sadly for Jeanne, they chose a wealthy man 22 years her senior. Jeanne tried her best to stop the marriage but her parents tricked her into signing the articles of marriage without informing her what they were. On February 18, 1664, the bishop performed this marriage ceremony. Almost immediately, Jeanne found herself in an extraordinarily unhappy marriage with no way out of the situation. She lived with both her husband and her mother-in-law, both of whom tried to stop her prayer life.

Madame Guyon

On July 22, 1668, Jeanne could bear her sad life no more. She sought out the counsel of a wise Franciscan monk, Abbé Archange Enguerrand, who advised her to change herself. “It is, Madame, because you seek outside what you have within. Accustom yourself to seek God in your heart, and you will find him there.” Jeanne described the experience of hearing this like an arrow going through her heart.

Maybe we would understand Jeanne’s experience through the more traditional term of stigmata, a spiritual wound that opens a deep connection with God. Later she called this the beginning of divinization, as she changed the noun “divine” into an active verb “to divinize.”

No words easily describe what happened to Jeanne in her divine wounding. Reaching beyond terrestrial cause and effect, she moved into places of unimaginable love. Her heart became mysteriously intertwined with the divine. She describes God as if he were a human lover. In her revealing quote, Jeanne said, “I loved Him, and I burnt with love, because I loved Him. I loved Him in such a way that I could only love Him; but in loving Him I had no motive but himself.” To pray in solitude became her highest joy.

And Jeanne knew the passion of God was for her, a fiery love she never became separated from again. Nothing stood in the way of this love: threats and imprisonments did not deter Jeanne from seeking and confirming the love of Christ.

Yet Jeanne still experienced real struggles and unhappiness in her home. She had quickly given birth to five children with the family tensions impacting all of the relationships. Through the well-documented conflicted marriage described in Jeanne’s Autobiography, we get an understanding of Monsieur Guyon as a solid and serious engineer who felt torn between his young wife and controlling mother. Yet it is also clear that he admired many of his wife’s qualities. Indeed, when he got into legal problems when King Louis XIV’s brother sued Monsieur Guyon, at his request Jeanne successfully represented him in court. Jeanne wrote that before he died, she and her husband shared an intimate reconciliation.

After her husband’s death in 1676, Jeanne was left a wealthy widow with a four-month-old daughter and two older children (two of her children had already died of smallpox). She put most of her money into trusts for her children. Then Jeanne planned her new life along with the assistance of her spiritual director, Abbé François La Combe. She and La Combe bonded and shared hopes that the direct spiritual action of God would work through their lives. Through their faithful obedience, the sick would be healed, the ignorant would see, Christ would walk in merciful kindness among his people.

Abbé La Combe moved to work in Geneva and shortly afterward Jeanne moved her young daughter to a place near him in Gex to live at a nunnery. Together La Combe and Jeanne developed hospitals and worked for the relief of suffering. Jeanne started writing her books, including her two most famous A Short and Easy Method of Prayer and Commentary on Song of Songs. With her growing popularity as an author, La Combe and Jeanne became increasingly controversial and in 1685, the Bishop of Geneva, d’Aranthon told them to leave his diocese. Jeanne and her daughter Jeanne-Marie began to travel all over Europe, staying with aristocrats while Jeanne talked to others about spiritual wisdom.

Outside world events soon impacted Jeanne and La Combe’s lives. In 1687 at the request of Louis XIV, the Vatican declared Quietism a heresy. Sadly, soon Abbé la Combe and Jeanne found themselves accused of this spirituality that emphasized the knowledge of God through quiet. The trusting priest La Combe returned to Paris to defend himself against these charges. Quickly La Combe’s superiors in the Barnabite order arranged a guilty judgment and he was sent away to prison. La Combe was imprisoned until his death 27 years later.

In January 1688, Jeanne was also charged with Quietism and incarcerated in an unventilated room in the House of the Visitation in Paris. She went through lengthy interrogations by church officials and Bishop Bossuet, a bishop at Meaux, who was also active at Versailles. Jeanne’s friends and relatives advocated for her release and after the intervention of the third wife of Louis XIV, Madame de Maintenon with her husband, Jeanne was released.

Madame de Maintenon, morganatic wife of Louis XIV

Soon after regaining her freedom, Jeanne met Abbé François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon at a social gathering near Versailles. A prestigious priest at Versailles, Fénelon was chosen to be the royal tutor for Lous XIV’s grandson, the Duke of Burgundy.

An unusual group arose at Versailles called the Court Cenacle, a group of the leading dukes, their wives, Jeanne, Fenelon, and Madame de Maintenon. They met to pray for a spiritual reformation in France and, in particular, for the conversion of Louis XIV. The Court Cenacle chose intimacy with God and a weekly evening of quiet prayer instead of the many human pleasures available at Versailles. This group trusted that each individual would keep the existence of this prayer circle unknown so as to avoid the wrath of Louis.

For Louis XIV’s genius was to explore the human spirit while frequently neglecting the spiritual life. French aristocracy at Versailles enjoyed the arts: theater, ballet, and concerts. It was as if Louis conceived a social experiment: what happens when you take people away into grand buildings, food, theater, gambling, jewelry, and sex involving aphrodisiacs. What happens when you intensify pleasure? What is in the human heart?

Yet in France the counter-point to the pleasurable Versailles was the horrific Bastille. In this prison, Louis XIV intensified anonymity and pain. Under Louis’ authority, instruments of torture were developed and used on his prisoners who had no legal right of appeal. For when imprisoned by a lettre de cachet, people were put to an ultimate test. Will one suffer without losing one’s mind, heart and spirit?

Louis designed Versailles (where he placed his treasured court) and the Bastille (where he placed his despised political prisoners). Louis also seemed passionate about questions about the human heart. What is a human being in the infinite? Or what is a person inundated by opportunities for pleasure? Or, conversely, what is a person who only sees and experiences deprivation and, at times, pure horror?

Jeanne’s peace at Versailles did not last for long. Bishop Bossuet wanted to become the archbishop of Paris, and his chief rival for this position was his former student, Archbishop Fenelon. And soon Madame de Maintenon had become jealous of Fenelon’s relationship with Jeanne. Along with the help of the influential Bossuet, de Maintenon told her husband that Jeanne was a heretical Quietist. At the same time, both Bossuet and de Maintenon demanded that Fenelon betray Jeanne.

The stage was set for a tragedy of epic proportions. If Fenelon betrayed Jeanne, she would probably be burned at the stake, as Bossuet was requesting. If he did not, Fenelon would be ridiculed as too attached to this woman Jeanne who they considered a heretical Quietist.

Some people proposed ideas of how Jeanne could get out of this situation. Bossuet said that if she would sign statements admitting theological mistakes, he would exonerate her. But Jeanne knew that this could be an even worse danger because admitted heresy could lead to capital punishment, such as happened to Joan of Arc. But Jeanne’s friends proposed she run away to England and this would have probably promised safety to her.

Jeanne attempted with all her human powers to avoid her second incarceration, yet stopped short of leaving France, her beloved home country, for a safe haven in England. She believed that God asked her to remain faithful to both her country and her Roman Catholic Church, even if this required suffering. Maybe her thinking was something like that of Socrates who said he would not desert his country, even if it would save his life.

Difficult to imagine, Jeanne’s character allowed herself to be moved into the intensification of pain for spiritual reasons of love. But she did it knowing that this was her time of annihilation, and like the young girl she had read about, she would see if the God like a mighty eagle would became one with her.

A letter de cache was issued by Louis and signed by Bishop Bossuet ordering that Jeanne be found and incarcerated.

Jeanne struggled with this situation and wrote, “Since I am not a theologian, . . .why put me in prison?”.  The real goal here was the destruction of Fenelon. What could happen to Fenelon if his close friend was publicly burned at the stake? Why kill these women they called witches? The burning at the stake was the ultimate test. Would their powers end when their bodies ended or would an irrepressible power manifest itself? The question became, what power does a human being have if they touch the infinite.

Jeanne attempted to escape this incarceration with honor. In July 1695, Jeanne moved to Paris under an assumed name, taking with her two servants. When one of her faithful servants went to move furniture one day, she was recognized on the street. Someone followed her home to find out Jeanne’s address. The police were notified. They watched and when the servant came back out, they stopped and searched her. Finding the key to Jeanne’s house, they went there.

On December 27, 1695, the French policeman Desgrez quietly walked into Jeanne’s room and arrested her. He had stationed from twenty to thirty armed policemen all around her house. She went with him quietly and the first night of her incarceration she spent at his home.

She was taken to the imposing Castle Vincennes, on the outskirts of Paris. This was used as a prison for religious heretics and freethinkers. When they searched her upon arrival, they found two wax statues and assumed that this was part of her witches’ tools. Instead she protested that this was a statue of the baby Jesus and the archangel Michael. They did not believe her.

Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, assiduous and zealous but in many ways forward-thinking Lieutenant General of the Paris police

The head of police in Paris, Monsieur Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie, searched for signs of any possible crimes during many twelve hour interrogations. After months of questioning and finding no evidence of any crime, M. de La Reynie assured Jeanne, “All justice will be rendered to you.” (Bastille Witness, 4) She hoped that legal justice would be given to her but she believed that this suffering would continue to touch her.

Jeanne was asked to write a letter of condemnation of La Combe and refused saying that she would prefer to suffer than to obtain freedom through such dishonest means. Expressing her inner conviction about God’s protection of her, Jeanne declared, “Nothing in the world is capable of breaking me.”

Jeanne wrote that de la Reynie said to the policeman Desgrez, “Let’s get out of here. They want us to make that lady guilty and I find her very innocent. I do not want to serve as an instrument of her destruction.” She greatly feared her situation when de la Reynie left because she did not want to be left under the complete power of the Roman Catholic Church. Bossuet had written openly that she should be sent “to the fires,” or burning at the stake.

Monsieur de la Reynie reported to the authorities, “You have tormented this person for so little.” Yet at this time her torments had really only begun.

Following her ten-month incarceration in Vinceness, on October 16, 1696, the church authorities moved her to a nunnery in Vaugirard. There she was frequently beaten on the face, while living in a decrepit room. “I easily saw that they had some plan to have me escape and then blame my family or friends for it.” (21)

Yet Jeanne had a way of understanding her incarceration that aided her in keeping her sanity. She wrote, “I considered myself a little bird that You had in a cage for Your own pleasure and who had to sing to fulfill her state.” She said, “My solitude was my delight.”

Jeanne had many interactions with a priest, the rector of Saint-Sulpice named La Chétardie. “I also asked him to consult the king on my behalf.” Following her frequent requests, she received attention from the Archbishop of Paris Louis de Noailles. He processed into her small room at the nunnery fully vested in his hierarchical finery. Accusing her of immoralities with La Combe, he informed her that she would make a public confession of shameful and licentious acts with La Combe. He declared, “I am your archbishop. I have the power to condemn you. Yes, I do condemn you.’” Jeanne described her response to him, “I responded to him, smiling. ‘Sir, I hope God will be more indulgent and that he will not approve of that sentence.’ He told me that my servants would suffer martyrdom for my sake since I seduced everyone I came in contact with.”

Several of the servants at the nunnery began to warn Jeanne of terrible things that were going to happen to her. They presented a forged letter to her, saying that it was from La Combe confessing of immorality with her. Jeanne confronted them with the differences in handwriting from that of La Combe’s. Jeanne began to have dreams in which La Combe appeared to her. In one dream, he was sick and suffering, yet told her that her afflictions prepared her for an eternal weight of glory; Jeanne found comfort in this dream, yet the sad predictions were true.

Finally in the most poignant and understated sentence in her autobiography, she wrote in one brief sentence, “They then took me to the Bastille alone.”

In the Bastille, Jeanne knew humid, dank conditions with little human contact. She listened to pacing and screaming humans waiting to be ‘put to the question,’ i.e. to be tortured. The authorities refused Jeanne the sacraments and Jeanne watched two young women assigned to guard her sicken and die.

Yet as Jeanne discovered, suffering can be a gift—the intensification of life so that she have eyes to see. Jeanne’s theology of life was based on a scripture from I Peter that reads. “Place your worries in the hands of the Lord and He will act himself. Abandon yourself to His guidance and He will guide your steps.”

Jeanne described her move to the Bastille. “Then I was placed in solitary confinement in the Bastille in a bare cell. At first I had to sit on the floor.” She said she listened to the torments of other human beings. On the floor above her, she listened to a man who “paced day and night without ceasing or resting for even a moment, and ran around like a maniac.” Jeanne heard him fall and when she could, told the guards that he tried to kill himself. They found him “drowning in his own blood” after stabbing himself in the stomach.

Jeanne wrote about the conditions at the Bastille. “In this place they only let you know what can afflict you and you know nothing of what can please you. You only see stern faces that treat you with the worst sort of harshness. You are without defense when they accuse you. They let the outside world hear what they want. . . But in the Bastille, you have no one.”

Her interrogator, the new chief of police in Paris was René de Voyer d’Argenson (1652-1721). He threatened Jeanne and attempted to get her to confess crimes but she continued to declare her innocence. D’Argenson also warned her that he was capable of sending her to the infamous prison the Conciergerie that could lead to torture and a death sentence, the prison that later sent many to the guillotine. Jeanne wrote, “For d’Argenson told me: ‘You are tired of being in an honorable prison. If you want to taste the Conciergerie, you will taste it.’ Sometimes, when they were taking me downstairs, they showed me a door and told me that it was there that they tortured. Other times, they showed me a dungeon. I told them I thought it was very pretty and that I would live well there.”

Yet something very odd happened to Louis XIV. From the hometown of Nostradamus came a man with a warning to Louis. He knew something that verified himself to Louis as an authentic prophet and gave a private warning to Louis. Some speculate that the warning was about the incarceration of Jeanne and other faithful believers. In 1700 after Bishop Bossuet met with the bishops, they declared her innocent of immorality and in 1703 Jeanne was released from the Bastille. They had to carry her out of the Bastille on a litter.

And then Jeanne found a profound ministry. People from around the globe showed up at Madame Guyon’s cottage wanting to talk of spiritual matters. Quakers from Pennsylvania came seeking guidance about human happiness, a Scottish Lord Deskford came to offer his administrative and writing skills, and Protestants everywhere asked about her faithful joy. Letters to and from her friend Archbishop Francois Fenelon flew fast and faithfully between them. And her daughter Jeanne-Marie offered a sweet consolation that fulfilled Jeanne’s heart.

The world did its best to separate Jeanne with her unusual passion for God in many ways: a forced marriage, a personal inquisition, and a long incarceration. Still Jeanne prayed joyously, singing like a bird in the cage of this world.

But even as scholars heatedly debate Jeanne’s life and words, we see how profound her interpretation of her century was. She correctly understood how deeply the peasants needed help; she gave much money and food to the poor, while building hospitals for the ill. She saw that if people knew how to pray, they would hope and work to make better lives for themselves. She helped with the education of girls and helped improve the lives of women.

All of her very successful work gave evidence that she understood the needs of her century and poured out her life trying to help. One of her translators, Thomas Taylor Allen, wrote that if the French leaders in her time had listened to Fenelon and Jeanne, the horrors of the French Revolution might have been avoided.

Jeanne believed though that in the Bastille, she experienced her annihilation and her joy became powerful and intensified. Jeanne never regretted her actions and ends Bastille Witness with a plain declaration that she would never change to please the world. “And if it were necessary to change my conduct to be queen, I would not be able to do it. When my simplicity caused me all the troubles in the world, I could not leave simplicity aside.”

Jeanne lived her beliefs and stated that in the Bastille she became annihilated and the eagle of God joined with her humble suffering. She described her experience in a poem,

But Love seeks nobler aims

In self-denial finds its joy,

In suffering her repose.

For sorrow and love walk hand in hand;

No height or depth can ever divide

This heaven-directed marriage;

These dear friends complete a union

Until the race of life is run.

About the author

Nancy C. James, PhD, is the author of The Complete Madame Guyon (Paraclete Press, 2011). James received her PhD from the University of Virginia with a dissertation written on Madame Jeanne Guyon.

Share/Bookmark

When we left Théroigne de Méricourt at the end of part one, she was beginning to sense a new energy in the streets of Paris in the spring of 1789. Like so much of social and political life at the time, this energy seemed to coalesce and find its fullest expression at the heady Palais Royal, where Théroigne would often be found walking, absorbing the new ideas and revelling in a newfound feeling that change was finally coming. ‘Everyone’s countenance seemed to have altered’, she wrote, ‘each person had fully developed his character and natural facilities. I saw many who, though covered in rags, had a heroic air’.

Although she was not, as would later be rumoured, involved in the storming of the Bastille, she became an active participant in revolutionary activity immediately afterwards, and was in the crowd when the king was forced to wear a revolutionary cockade on 17th July. At this time, she began to adopt a mode of dress that would make her from the very start striking, and later iconic. She wore a white riding habit (an amazone) and a round-brimmed hat, wanting to ‘play the role of a man’, she later explained, because I had always been extremely humiliated by the servitude and prejudices, under which the pride of men holds my oppressed sex’.

BEFORE: Portrait presumed to be of Théroigne de Méricourt on the eve of the Revolution, attributed to Antoine Vestier via Wikimedia Commons

AFTER: Théroigne in her new mode of dress, which helped make her famous (portrait around 1818) via Wikimedia Commons

She moved to Versailles so that she could attend the meetings of the National Assembly every day, where she was quickly noticed as the first to take her seat in the gallery in the morning, and the last to leave at night. Though initially baffled by the often highly complex debates, she taught herself to understand the issues at stake, and became more and more convinced of the justice of the cause.

Théroigne seems to have been the sort of person myths wind themselves around, and it would come to be said that she lead the market women who stormed Versailles on 5 October 1789. In fact, she spent most of the night in bed, and though she did go to the palace the next day to see what was going on (as the royal family were removed, and marched to Paris), there’s no reason to believe she played any leading role. Again, it was perhaps Théroigne’s unforgettable image which made her so easy to pick out of any crowd, and so easy for people to burn into memories in which she actually had no part.

When the National Assembly moved to Paris in October 1789, Théroigne followed it and remained a committed attendee, personally getting to know many influential figures such as Desmoulins, Brissot, Pétion and the Abbé Sieyès. Théroigne  played an extraordinary role in this phase of the revolution, founding her own club, running a salon, and even on one occasion speaking at the Cordeliers Club. She became a celebrity, and it was at this time that she began to be called Théroigne de Méricourt, an affection she never used herself. But despite all this, it was starting to become increasingly clear that the Revolution would not bring the changes that she had hoped for. Women were not after all to be treated as equal citizens, in fact the attitude towards them from many quarters was at best suspicious and at worst downright poisonous. The press decried her as a whore, and legend began to place the figure in the amazone and broad hat (now often with a sword and pistols swinging about her waist for good measure) in any number of the most violent, pivotal moments of the revolution. Deep down, the spectacle of liberated women terrified most men, and Théroigne was its living embodiment.

In the summer of 1790, Théroigne left Paris, bitterly disappointed. Her tale might well have ended here, and still have been more interesting than a hundred ordinary people’s, but with the story of Théroigne de Méricourt, getting the feeling that it must, surely be over is generally the best indication that it’s about to get even more fascinating. She returned to her native Liège, presumably seeking some respite from the turmoil of recent years. Unfortunately, she had not left her notoriety in Paris, and Liège – then under the control of the Austrian Empire – was not the best place for a woman rumoured to have hatched a plot to assassinate Marie-Antoinette to pick for a holiday. In short order, she was kidnapped by mercenaries, and subjected to a tortuous ten day journey to Austria, the captive of three ardent French emigrés who bullied, harassed and even attempted to rape her, but she was able to fight them off.

Kufstein Fortess by Konny via Panoramio

Eventually she arrived at the castle of Kuftstein in the Austrian Alps, where she came face to face with François de Blanc, the civil servant tasked with interrogating her by the Imperial Chancellor, Prince Kaunitz. Believing even the wildest rumours he had heard about Théroigne, Kaunitz fully expected her to reveal intimate details about the leaders of the revolution, their ideas and their aims. Over the course of the next month, de Blanc spent many hours locked in conversation with Théroigne, as well as examining the contents of papers which had been seized when she was captured. These contained records of her political activities, notes on books she had read as well as ‘strange, dark, stream of consciousness writings’, as biographer Lucy Moore describes them. In one such piece, she imagined building a bronze edifice containing a black vault with the statue of a woman, trampling tyranny under foot, represented by the figure of a man. ‘This woman will reach out her hand to me’, Theroigne wrote in black, underlined letters, ‘and will cry out: help me or I shall succumb. I will then take hold of a dagger from nearby and I shall strike the man’.

Blanc soon became aware that Théroigne  had no insights into the minds of the revolutionary leaders, and even seems to have become fond of her, calling her ‘luminous and surprising’. He was clearly concerned for her health, given her bouts of depression, coughing blood, insomnia and splitting headaches, and he travelled with her to Vienna to press for her release. After this was secured, she would continue to write to him, signing herself ‘votre toute dévouée’.

By the start of 1792 Théroigne was back in Paris, having picked up a few more rumours along the way, including the delicious whisper that she had converted the Austrian Emperor to the Revolutionary cause during her audience with him. Seeming not only to have recovered her political energy, she was in truth more fiery than ever, wading into the increasingly dangerous battle between Brissot and Robespierre on the side of the former. She was lauded as a hero in the Jacobin Club and invited to speak there. She gave incendiary speeches, calling to women, ‘Let us raise ourselves to the height of our destinies; let us break our chains!’. She was also, for the first time, actually involved in militant activity, drumming up female warriors for the conflicts she felt were to come. Finally living up to her fearsome reputation, Théroigne was in the thick of the fighting when crowds stormed the Tuileries palace, where the royal family were then living, on 10th August. During this vicious battle, she is said to have lunged at the neck of a royalist journalist who had been particularly scathing towards her in the press. Fighting back, he was about to run her through when the crowd dragged him off and stabbed him to death.

Despite her undoubted appetite for violence when necessary, Théroigne  seems to have become concerned about the direction the Revolution was taking in the wake of the chaos of the September Massacres. She believed anarchy and in-fighting were frustrating all the aims of the Revolution, and in early 1793 called on citizens to ‘stop and think, or else we are lost’. In May 1793, a gang of women from the Jacobin Club, out for revenge on Brissotines, attacked Théroigne in the gardens of the Tuileries, stripping her naked and flogging her publicly. She was only saved by the intervention of Marat.

Contemporary sketch of the attack via Look and Learn

This incident seemed to have tipped Théroigne’s always fragile mental balance, and she began a descent into madness. She was arrested in the spring of 1794, at at which time she began fixating on Saint-Just, ally of Robespierre, as her saviour. She wrote to him from prison, begging him for light and paper so she could complete the work she still felt she had inside her. Saint-Just never opened her letter, which was found unopened after his death. After Robespierre’s downfall at the end of July, Théroigne joined the ranks of prisoners slipping out of Parisian jails, but the thread of her sanity was now well and truly broken.

Officially declared insane later that year, Théroigne was to spend the rest of her life in various asylums, clinging more and more strongly to her revolutionary beliefs. As Lucy Moore points out, this in itself was taken as a sure sign of madness in a country where the ideals of the revolution were steadily abandoned, if not reversed. She was interred in Paris’s infamously wretched Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in 1807. Apparently stuck in the world of 1794, she accused anyone who came near her of being royalist, and she talked to herself

‘for hours on end, muttering ritualised incantations about committees, decrees, villains, liberty and the revolution, at times smiling to an imaginary audience. Often naked, even in the coldest weather, she punctuated her monologues with baths of freezing water or self-abasement in muddy excrement’.

Lucy Moore

Théroigne de Méricourt, or Anne-Josèphe Terwagne as she really was, died in June 1817. Many have found echoes in her life of the story of the revolution as a whole, but more specifically hers is a tragic insight into women’s experiences of the Revolution. Most oddly, it reveals how many of its leaders and opinion-formers sought to make monsters not only out of female enemies (as demonstrated clearly in the trial of Marie-Antoinette) but also its most ardent supporters. Women, who had experienced all the indignities of the ancien régime in their sharpest forms, and who therefore were often the most energised by the promise of the Revolution, would come to see that the cry of liberty, equality and brotherhood was to be taken literally. In her madness, Anne-Josèphe Terwagne chose never to accept this fact, to believe that the movement she believed in more than anyone would some day fulfil its promise, and rescue her from the life of unhappiness and deep dissatisfaction she had known.

A portrait of Théroigne by 20th century surrealist painter Félix Labisse

More

 Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France
by Lucy Moore
Moore movingly tells the story of Théroigne as well as many other fascinating women in the Revolution.

Share/Bookmark

If the Austrian Emperor’s interrogator, François de Blanc, hadn’t already heard so much about the revolutionary prisoner, Théroigne de Méricourt, it’s unlikely a man like him would have believed much of the story she spun him. Stripped of the myth and legend that already surrounded the key events of her life, even the version of her story that could be more or less accepted as being ‘true’ had an implausible air to it, as if it had been spliced together from the more interesting parts of several different people’s lives. But perched in the chilly, remote and echoingly vast medieval mountaintop fortres of Kufstein, over 6 months in 1791 a peculiar thing happened. As the days went by in this strange, intimate isolation, the arch civil servant de Blanc was starting to not only believe Théroigne de Méricourt, he was starting to like her. Intrigued by the details of her extraordinary life, charmed by her passion and intensity, and moved by her experience of the Revolution, which reflected all of its excitements, contradictions and fickle cruelties, de Blanc became the strongest advocate for the freedom of his captive.

Like so much else that came to make up her fearsome reputation, even the name Théroigne de Méricourt was a creation, later applied to the woman born in 1762 near Liège, with the much more humble moniker of Anne-Josèphe Terwagne. Her mother died when she was five, and she was sent to live with an Aunt, who initially packed her off to a convent, then, unable or unwilling to meet the cost of maintaining her there, brought her back into her own home, but in the humiliating position of maid. When her father remarried, Anne- Josèphe returned to live with him, but her stepmother was more interested in raising her own children than looking after Anne-Josèphe (the wicked stepmother type so beloved of fairytales had its origins, as Robert Darnton argued, in the very real social tensions of this kind of all-too-common scenario at a time of high mortality and frequent remarriage).

Having made further unsuccessful attempts to find a place she could call home with her mother’s parents, and even, one can only assume out of pure desperation, making another go of things with her aunt, Anne-Josèphe finally realised that she was going to have to look after herself. Taking any work she could to sustain herself, she eventually found her way into the employ of a Madame Colbert, working as her companion. Mme Colbert taught her to read and write as well as to sing and play the piano. Inspired by her success, Anne-Josèphe began to dream of a future as a singer. Perhaps she could have achieved it – by all accounts she had the talent – but at the age of twenty she entered into what would be the first of a string of reckless, dubious and ultimately disastrous relationships with men.

She was seduced by an English army officer who promised to marry her when he came of age, and whisked her off to Paris. He never made good on his promise, but Anne-Josèphe continued her relationship with him, as well as the marquis de Persan. Though the marquis was, as Lucy Moore (who tells this story in detail in her excellent Liberty) puts it, ‘elderly and unpleasant’, he lavished her with gifts and money. Anne-Josèphe had meandered into the life of a courtesan, adopting the soubriquet Mlle Campinado, and often seen at the opera, alone in a large box, dripping with diamonds.

When she had a daughter with the Englishman, he refused to acknowledge the child, and was no doubt unmoved when it died of smallpox in 1788 (though this would always be a particularly painful memory for Anne-Josèphe). She then began an affair with an Italian tenor, who proved far more romantic on stage than in life, and she then fell victim to the charms of another Italian singer, this time (oddly) the castrato Tenducci, known throughout Europe as – somehow – a great ladies’ man. She followed him to Genoa, where the singing career she had dreamed of almost looked like coming true, but beyond a few concerts nothing seems to have happened. Behind the scenes she faced a bitter and now all-too familiar breakup from Tenducci, and battled with the terrifying symptoms of a severe venereal disease.

The castrato and ladykiller Giusto Fernando Tenducci – final proof that size isn’t everything

After a year, Anne-Josèphe returned to Paris, the collapse of her dreams in Genoa marking just the last in the string of failures that had made up her life thus far. Her attempts to find a family, her efforts to turn a voice that had seemed remarkable in the provinces into a career on the world stage, and above all her experiences with men had ended in nothing but disappointment, exploitation and pain. As luck would have it though, there would be no time for moping, because she so happened to find herself back in Paris in May of 1789, at the beginning of a summer of endless, irrefusable opportunities for change and reinvention. For Anne-Josèphe, like for so many others, the coming of the revolution seemed to offer not only a chance to regain control over her own destiny, but also a way of wiping out the failures of her past.

Share/Bookmark

In 1920s Paris, pained, fuzzy-headed morning afters must have been as defining a feature of life as the sparkling night befores that brought them on. On some of these grey mornings there were some unfortunates, still hours away from achieving verticality and spooling the evening’s events through their minds trying to fill in the blanks, who might have sworn that last night they had met the ghost of Oscar Wilde himself.

It was an easy mistake to make. Everybody said that Dorothy Wilde, known always as Dolly, looked startlingly like her infamous uncle, who had died in Paris in 1900 at the shabby Hôtel d’Alsace (now L’Hotel). Dolly’s natural resemblance to Oscar was only enhanced by her propensity to dress like him, even on occasions as him. You might even be forgiven for imagining that she was Oscar’s daughter, given how strongly she gravitated towards his memory and how little she spoke of her actual father, Oscar’s older brother Willie. Like Dolly, born three months after Oscar’s arrest for homosexual acts, Willie lived in the shadow of his younger brother. The two looked so alike that Willie joked that Oscar once paid him to grow a moustache so people could tell them apart. In any other family, Willie, who was certainly not without charm and was a journalist of some talent, might well have been the star. In the Wilde family, however, his achievements were eclipsed both by his brother’s incandescent fame and dark disgrace, and by his own descent into severe alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, abusive behaviour and chronic debt problems. Willie was regarded as a family joke by the Wildes, and towards the end of his life, shabby, shuffling, dirty and pathetic, he sponged, as Oscar said, on everyone but himself. Willie was in every way that mattered an absent father, and, perhaps as a means of filling this void, Dolly learned to idolise the uncle she had never met but had always exercised such a strange influence over her life.

Dolly arrived in Paris in 1914 at the age of 19. At a time when most girls, if they could contemplate any involvement in the war at all, wanted to be nurses, Dolly had come to France to drive ambulances on the front lines. This would be an exhilarating time in Dolly’s life, partly because she was never happier than when she was behind the wheel, partly because Paris in 1914 still represented a world of experimentation, freedoms and new ideas, and partly because she formed intimate relationships with the extraordinary group of women in her ambulance corps. She fell in love with Marion Carstairs, an oil heiress who usually dressed as a man and would in later years become a successful speedboat racer, have affairs with some of the most glamorous women of her age including Marlene Dietrich, and develop a semi-obsessive relationship with a doll she called Lord Tod Wadley, which she loved like a child.

Dolly, being one herself, seemed to attract fascinating women, who often seem more like characters out of the racier sort of novel than real people. She was fortunate enough to be in Paris at a time when women were very much in the ascendant. Dolly’s was a generation that had lost its men, in both the obvious sense that so many were slaughtered in the trenches, and because the scars inflicted physically and psychologically on those who survived so often left them backward-looking, introverted, and sapped of confidence. This created a strange situation in postwar Paris where the women of Dolly’s circle took over roles previously filled by men, often in remarkably direct ways. At a time when all England was scandalised by French tennis player Suzanne Lenglen who took to the courts at Wimbledon in a dress that barely covered her ankles, Dolly’s set of female friends in Paris wore trousers, smoked, and took other women as lovers. This was the era of Chanel, who cut her hair short simply because, she said, ‘it annoyed me’, and pioneered a new, androgynous style that helped finish off the world of corsets.

In the years shortly after the war, the world divided into two; one half feeling guilty about the idea of ever celebrating again, and the other half having practically nothing else to do. Dolly fell firmly into the latter camp, and her friends in the demi-monde would include the novelist and actress Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, American painter Romaine Brooks and the writers Renée Vivien and Elisabeth de Gramont. She would also have known the singular figure of Josephine Baker, an African American performer who became a sensation at the Folies Bergères, appearing on stage nude and often accompanied by her pet cheetah, looking resplendent in his diamond-encrusted collar. Some people would claim to have spotted her taking the cheetah out for a walk along the banks of the Seine.

Josephine Baker, with her cheetah

Most central of all to Dolly was Natalie Clifford Barney, the American writer who was to be the love of Dolly’s life. For over 60 years, starting in 1909, Barney held a literary salon in her house on the Rue Jacob every Friday. The list of people who came to sample the famous cucumber sandwiches and still more famous conversation reads like a who’s who of the cultural life of the era, including Rodin, Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes,  W. Somerset Maugham, F. Scott Fitzgerald and T. S. Eliot.

Natalie Clifford Barney, already imposing at twenty, painted by her mother Alice Pike Barney in 1896.

But even in this illustrious company, people still came home from the salons talking about Dolly Wilde. With her imposing physical presence, swept back hair, dreamy, sad eyes and chiselled jawline, Dolly looked enough like Oscar that the effect could be haunting, but she was also strikingly beautiful – something even Oscar’s greatest admirers could never say about him. Journalist Frank Harris once said of Oscar that he used the entrancing power of his words to distract people from his ‘repellent physical pecuilarities’. Dolly had no need to do this but she certainly knew how to work the same magic. Her conversation was, from the accounts that survive, funny, lyrical, flowing, intimate, interested, penetrating and frequently acerbic. The most tantalising and frustrating part of trying to understand Dolly Wilde is that the hypnotising experience of being in a room with her is lost forever now. Even those who experienced it struggled to recreate it, those grey morning afters having rubbed the edges off the memory, and her essence stubbornly refusing to be separated from herself. While Oscar left a body of written work that would make his wit immortal, Dolly never managed to distil her great talent with words into writing, and so it died with the last person who remembered her.

Along with her bewitching talents, Dolly also inherited the more poisonous Wilde family traits that drew her darkly and powerfully towards tragedy. Her great love for Natalie Clifford Barney brought her lacerating pain as much as intense pleasure. Barney was not what you might call a one woman woman. Even as Dolly was living in her home, Barney openly continued to have long-term relationships with two other women, as well as frequent liaisons with many others. There were times when Dolly would be dismissed from the house because Natalie had a new lover, only to be recalled again later, and uncountable nights when Dolly was left alone with torturing thoughts as Natalie exercised her extraordinary and insatiable talent for seduction.  Though Dolly also saw other women, it was without the detached cruelty that those closest to Barney admitted she was capable of, and deep down Dolly depended on Natalie for her happiness, like a flower bending towards the sunlight.

The melancholy beauty of Dolly Wilde, captured by Cecil Beaton.

Like her father, Dolly had no real understanding of money and consequently it always had a habit of slipping through her fingers, especially as her addiction to cocaine and later sleeping drugs took hold. She had enough friends that somehow she always managed to scrape together enough money to carry on, yet too few to fend off a deep and self-destructive unhappiness. Between the wars, the French coined an expression, to ‘avoir le cafard’, meaning a lingering and causeless dissatisfaction with life. Dolly Wilde was its living embodiment. Dolly fled Paris for London as the German army beat a path towards it in 1940, recognising that the party was well and truly over. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 1939, but refused an operation, seeking alternative treatments, but more and more relying on the solace of her various addictions.

In 1941, at the age of 45, she was found dead in her flat in London. She was almost exactly the same age as Oscar and Willie had been when they died. The coroner refused to be drawn on the cause of her death. Although several empty bottles of the sleeping drug paraldehyde were found in her flat, this was hardly unusual given her addiction, and there is no evidence that she had taken cocaine. So Dolly Wilde’s death, like the rest of her life, is ambiguous and uncertain. Perhaps she had simply died of the cancer she had refused to tackle head on. Perhaps, as some people said, Natalie Barney had driven her to suicide, as she had at least one of her other lovers. Crueller tongues might have wagged that she had simply fulfilled her destiny as a Wilde; Dolly, after all, was Oscar, with all the tragedy and none of the talent. This of course does Dolly a huge disservice. The story of Dolly Wilde shines a light on a time of distinctively beautiful but fragile decadence in the history of Paris and it reveals the swirling and often devastating wake created by a fame as great as Oscar Wilde’s. More than that, it allows us an introduction to a circle of truly fascinating people who could never have existed except in that precise moment in time, and whose world, like those nights recalled through a haze of headaches and regret, can never fully be recovered.

More

• Joan Schenkar’s Truly Wilde is the only biography of Dolly Wilde, and thankfully, it’s as distinctive and intriguing as she was.

Share/Bookmark

In the last part of the guide to Marie Antoinette’s trial, I looked at the way she dealt with the completely unexpected and totally secret interrogation which was sprung upon her two nights before the trial proper was to begin.

The challenge that faced her on the morning of 14th October was very different. This time there was no dark chamber populated by a few shadowy figures. This time the Great Hall of the Revolutionary Tribunal had been transformed into the great political theatre that was in many respects its prime function, and it quickly became clear that this performance would be standing room only. Every available seat was taken, most picturesquely by the infamous tricoteuses – a gang of ardent women, like some sinister version of Donny Osmond fans, who attended so many trials and executions that they now bought their knitting with them to help pass those interminable moments waiting for the delivery of a verdict or the fall of a guillotine blade. The atmosphere was probably something akin to a circus, with refreshments on sale and lively, expectant chatter – especially as most of the Revolution’s darlings, including spidery Robespierre and hogheaded Danton, were in attendance. Fouquier-Tinville, who would be familiar to Marie Antoinette from the secret interrogation, was presiding as President of the Tribunal, a position it’s easy to confuse with judge, but as we’ll see his role was really more that of at best ringmaster and at worst chief cheerleader for for the Revolution. The jury, such as it was, was packed partly with Robespierre’s cronies and partly with humble but stalwart ‘grassroots’ supporters of the Revolution.

Marie Antoinette’s beleaguered lawyers, Tronson Doucoudray and Claude Chaveau-Lagarde, had sent a letter requesting a delay to the start of the trial, so as to allow some extension to the scant day they had been allowed with their client. This letter had gone unanswered.

When the door finally opened and the guest of honour arrived, it’s hard to know what the reaction of the crowd was to seeing their former queen, but I’m tempted to imagine that things suddenly fell electrically silent, for a brief moment at least. As Antonia Fraser points out, perhaps the first thought that went through most people’s minds was ‘That’s Marie Antoinette?’. Hidden from public view for over a year, Marie Antoinette was utterly transformed, and it must in that instant have seemed impossible to comprehend that this was the woman about whom legends of luxury, frivolity and beauty had been spun. She was on this October morning nothing more than a frail, sick woman – far older than her 37 years. She went to the armchair on the witness platform, and the tricoteuses shouted complaints that she was being allowed to sit.

What follows was a truly remarkable piece of theatre that I do urge you to read if you can. This event represents something that’s quite rare in history – a person being forced to confront their own legend during their lifetime, and in some respects an entire era, an entire way of life, being put on trial and condemned. Here I’ll try to pick out some of the most revealing moments.

> Fouquier-Tinville’s opening statement is one of the most vitriolic, misogynistic tirades you’re likely to read for a good long while. It’s hard not read it without picturing a man spitting in great torrents, with an ever-reddening face. To take an example, early on in the speech, Fouquier-Tinville states

it appears that, like Messalina, Brunehaut, Fredigonde and Medicis, who were formerly distinguished by the titles of Queens of France, whose names have ever been odious, and will never be effaced from the pages of history – Marie Antoinette, widow of Louis Capet, has, since her abode in France, been the scourge and the blood-sucker of the French. (p21)

There is never any pretence of impartiality in this trial, and the tone of persecution rather than prosecution is established from the very first moments. Here, Marie Antoinette is placed in a long, spectacular and peculiarly French line of female hate figures. Messalina was wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius, and went down in legend as a depraved, promiscuous woman, who would have even killed her husband had her plots not been discovered just in time. Brunehild was the wife of King Sigebert in the medieval French kingdom of Austrasia. Accused of interfering in politics and the line of succession, her grotesque punishment was to be ‘tied to a camel for three days, and to be beaten and raped by anyone passing by’ (in the words of Andrew Hussey) on what is now the rue Saint-Honoré. Fredegund, Queen consort of Merovingian king Chilperic I, is said to have murdered the woman who previously held Chilperic’s heart in order to ascend the throne, and gone on to plot the murders of her her husband’s half-brother and his son, her own brother-in-law and several more besides, depending on which version of the story you hear. And Catherine de Medici, of course, is an out-and-out monster in French history, renowned for her deviousness, her duplicity, her political power won by machination and poison that prolonged the bitter Wars of Religion and led her to spark the dreaded St Batholomew’s Day massacre.

It’s highly revealing that Marie Antoinette could with absolute seriousness be added to this list. It makes clear that the hatred of her had become so widespread and passionate that she was already regarded more as a myth or a symbol than as an actual human being, and is also indicative of the level on which the trial is going to operate. There’s a huge disconnect between the gravity of the crimes implied by these comparisons and the evidence that is to be presented in the trial, indeed it is perhaps precisely because Fouquier-Tinville is acutely aware that he has so little to work with that he feels the need to destroy Marie Antoinette before the trial even begins. Later on in the opening statement he goes so far as to make the palpably ridiculous claim that Marie Antoinette was the driving force behind both counter-revolutionary pamphlets and writings “in which she herself is described in very unfavourable colours, in order to cloak the imposture”. There is also talk of “midnight meetings” and “creatures in the armies and public offices”: language, as I’ve said before, reminiscent of witchcraft trials. From the outset then, Marie Antoinette is painted as a monstrous, sinister woman forever meddling in politics, leader in fact of a vast and dangerous conspiracy.

> More generally there’s an anxious, heightened tension to the entire proceedings. At times it becomes perfectly clear that what’s at stake is as much the fate of the Revolution as Marie Antoinette. So we have the odd spectacle of witnesses seemingly included more to incriminate themselves than to shed any useful light on the case in hand. Both Pierre Manuel and Jean Sylvain Bailly were one-time heroes of the revolution who have by this stage turned against it and become its enemies. Both would be executed within a month of this trial. Both Danton and Robespierre would of course both be dead within a year, and even Fouquier-Tinville would follow those he had condemned to the scaffold with two.

> Then there’s the motley crew of witnesses that it’s remarkable Fouquier-Tinville even bothers to bring out. Pierre Joseph Terrason, employed in the office of the minister of justice, suggests that Marie Antoinette orchestrated the massacre on the Champ de Mars, on the basis that he once saw her give a ‘most vindictive glance; which suggested to him… the idea that she would certainly take an opportunity for revenge’ for the failed escape to Varenne (p42). Then Rene Mallet, a former ‘servant-maid’ who worked in some unspecified context in the Versailles area, recounts the frankly absurd story that Marie Antoinette had planned to assassinate the Duke of Orleans, and having been discovered by the king with two pistols concealed in her undergarments for this very purpose, was confined to her room for a fortnight (p51/52). Interestingly, Marie Antoinette’s response to this is very confused, saying ‘It is possible I might have received an order from my husband to remain a fortnight in my apartment, but it was not for a case similar to the above’. She is not asked to explain what the case might have been, so we can only wonder what incident she might be referring to. One gets the impression that at times Marie Antoinette, during this gruelling 2 day ordeal, at times slips into autopilot, especially when it’s so apparent that there’s really nothing for her to respond to.

> The uselessness of Marie Antoinette having any kind of nominal legal representation is clearly demonstrated when she hands a note to one of her counsel, and is immediately forced to read the note aloud like naughty schoolgirl.

> There are times when the queen is forced to abandon her general policy of flat denial, and the subject of her extravagance is certainly the most painful of these. Fouquier-Tinville asks (p61),

Where did you then get the money to build and fit out the Petit Trianon, in which you gave feasts, of which you were always the goddess?

In fact, Marie Antoinette had nothing to do with the building of the Petit Trianon, which was commissioned by Louis XV for his mistress Madame de Pompadour (though she did instigate major works in that area of the palace, including her infamous pretend village, the Hameau). She does not point this out, and rather, following further prodding, admits

It is possible that the Petit Trianon may have cost immense sums; may be more than I wished. This expence was incurred by inches; in fact I desire more than any one that every person may be informed what has been done there.

This is in many ways a damning confirmation of the Marie Antoinette myth: that she was responsible for huge amounts of money being wasted, without ever stopping to even think how much, that in essence she had no understanding of money whatsoever. Since this was the main reason the public hated her, this could have been a high point of the trial, but it isn’t. Her interrogators immediately swerve away without forcing any more admissions, again seeking to associate the queen with wider conspiracies rather than simple greed and ignorance.

In telling contrast to this admission is the poignant moment when all of Marie Antoinette’s remaining possessions are shown to the court (p53). These include a table of ‘cyphers’ which Marie Antoinette says was ‘to teach my child to reckon’, prayers, portraits of girls she knew as a child in Vienna, a symbol of the flaming heart (a known counter-revolutionary as well as religious symbol) and several locks of hair, which Marie Antoinette says are ”of my children, living and dead, and of my husband’. After all the excessive luxury of her youth, everything she owns can now be fit into a small parcel.

> Finally, there’s the moment when rabble-rouser Jacques René Hébert accuses the former queen of sexually abusing her son – the undoubted low point of the trial, which I’ve written about in a previous post. This accusation, based on the coerced confession of a sick and terrified child, is almost certainly without any substance whatsoever, and is revealing of the urgent need felt by Marie Antoinette’s accusers that she can’t simply die a criminal or a symbol of extravagance, but as a monster. She must be made to symbolise the complete moral degeneracy and destructiveness of the ancien régime and the pressing need to destroy it absolutely. The powerful and useful hatred felt by the sans-culottes can’t be allowed to be dissipate with her death, rather her memory must be a continuing force for action and a reminder that the Revolution is always unfinished.

Frankly, this particular ploy fails to land, and even Fouquier-Tinville seems embarrassed to question Marie Antoinette on the matter following Hébert’s theatrical delivery and, we can assume, a much more mixed reaction in the court room than he had hoped. No-one ever really seems to buy this over-baked and vindictive story, and it did not go on to become one of the elements of the Marie Antoinette myth that persists to this day.

When Marie Antoinette’s sentence was read out, she was asked by Fouquier-Tinville if she had any objection to make. She simply bowed her head and said nothing (p77). She left the court knowing she would be executed the next day. Marie Antoinette was the first and last Queen ever to be tried in France, and perhaps her greatest achievement in handling it lies in not providing the spectacle everybody hoped for. Innately recognising that the whole affair was a circus, she refused to become a sideshow, remaining calm, impenetrable – removed, almost, from the hoopla of the event. When the former Queen climbed the scaffold and met her death, the crowd was jubilant (save for the one person who surged forward to dip a cloth in her blood, and was immediately arrested) but for just the same reasons they always would have been. The trial had been revealing of so many things, but ultimately inconsequential. Half a year afterwards, Jacques René Hébert would find himself on trial at the Tribunal. Legend has it he petulantly threw his hat at his judges, then trembled on the scaffold. Marie Antoinette never gave this victory to her enemies. Her trial was her finest hour.

Share/Bookmark

There aren’t many things I’m good at doing if I’m suddenly woken up from sleeping. Operating a pair of trousers is a challenge, walking in a straight line a chore, and conducting a meaningful conversation a scientific impossibility.

I don’t want to become one of those web sites that worship the ground Marie Antoinette walked on, but on this most basic trouser-operating, conversation-having level, Marie Antoinette was something of a god. On that bitterly cold night, on 12th October 1794, the former queen was woken and taken from her cell to the Great Hall of the Revolutionary Tribunal. The room was inkily dark – only two candles flickered in the large space – making it more or less impossible to determine how many people were in the room, who exactly they were, or which shadow was speaking at any one time. Eventually, the figure of Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, the President of the Tribunal, emerged out of the gloom. Fouquier-Tinville had already earned himself the reputation as one of the Revolution’s attack dogs, having conducted the trials of such revolutionary bête noires as Charlotte Corday (Marat’s assassin) and many other less famous unfortunates. Totally ruthless in pursuit of revolutionary justice, legend had it he slept with an armed guard at his door and a hatchet under his bed, for fear of the people he was sworn to protect.

Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville

Fouqier-Tinville was not an easy man to square up to at the best of times, and these were not the best of times. Marie Antoinette arrived in the chamber for the secret interrogation having no prior knowledge that it was to take place, much less what would be asked of her. She had no legal counsel of any kind, and was utterly alone in the room. She had been imprisoned for many months; both her mental and physical health were as low as they had ever been. But if nothing else, Antoinette was a performer, and in the secret interrogation she turns in the performance of a lifetime.

The entire purpose of the secret interrogation was to try to obtain evidence that could be used against Marie Antoinette in the trial. There was of course no opportunity to plead the Fifth here. As we shall see, though Marie Antoinette’s guilt was pre-determined and already certain in the minds of almost everyone in France, the actual case that had been assembled against her was in most particulars very far from impressive. Fouquier-Tinville, in short, needed Marie Antoinette to slip up here, to give something away under pressure – hence fetching her in the middle of the night, hence the darkness, hence the lack of ceremony and quick-fire questioning.

Who knows if Marie Antoinette had decided her gameplan at some point previously, or if it came to her on the spot, but her approach (as it will be throughout the trial) is to remain matter-of-fact to a level which is almost robotic, to never rise to bait or give emotional answers, and to be as brief as possible. This is an especially clever tactic in contrast to the hyperbolic, hysterical fervour of her accusers. Though it was always likely to be construed by her enemies as yet another example of her legendary coldness, it provided her with a solid emotional compass to guide her through the most dramatic moments of the trial. Perhaps we can even go further – perhaps this is the stance of a woman who deep down knows that her death is coming, and has determined to deny every possible ounce of satisfaction she can to the people who will exact it.

Without losing sight of her overriding tactic, the former queen never capitulates or gives an inch, especially where matters of pride are concerned. Early on, when asked where she had been when she was arrested, she responds that she has never been arrested, but has simply been conveyed to her various prisons (p10) – a technicality, perhaps, given her current situation, but one which clearly matters to her.

There’s little in the accusations wheeled out during the secret interrogation that’s likely to have come as much of a surprise to Marie Antoinette. What might have been more shocking though is the manner in which the accusations were put to her. Even in the past few years, in her private life at least Marie Antoinette had remained relatively shielded from open disrespect or scorn, especially as she always seems to have worked some kind of softening magic on the people who served her. Although the secret interrogation does not rise to the theatrical heights of venom and rage unleashed in the trial itself, her accusers are openly confrontational and superior, and certainly display not a shred of the awed deference with which she had been treated throughout her life as a princess and queen. This was not something she was accustomed to.

The old accusations are trotted out one by one, beginning with the belief that Marie Antoinette provided money to Austria to fund a war against the Revolution. This she flatly denies, and points out astutely that ‘my brother did not want money from France’, which doubtless had none to give anyway. When accused of holding ‘secret and nocturnal petty councils’ (in the language, very reminiscent of witchcraft, which is a feature of the trial) with her supporters, she boldly replies that “the rumour of those committees has constantly existed whenever it was intended to amuse and deceive the people”. Then, when accused of ignoring the entreaties of the “then minister of justice” Danton in November 1791, Marie Antoinette makes a factual correction, saying Danton was not the minister at that time (p12).

Her answers betray an extraordinary amount of self control, clearly holding back very real anger which sometimes nearly breaks through before being reigned in again, as in this exchange (p12-13).

TRIBUNAL

Observed, that it was she who taught Louis Capet that profound dissimulation by which he has for too long deceived the kind French nation, who did not believe that perfidy and villainy could be carried to such a degree.

MARIE ANTOINETTE

Yes, the people have been deceived – cruelly deceived! But it was neither by her nor her husband.

TRIBUNAL

By whom, then, has the people been deceived?

MARIE ANTOINETTE

By those who felt it their interest; that it has never been theirs to deceive them.

Marie Antoinette quickly dismisses questions over the royal family’s escape plan by sticking to what was always the family’s official line – that they had never intended to escape France, but rather to find a safer part of it and “conciliate thence all parties for the happiness and tranquillity of France” (p13). Even the most ardent Marie Antoinette fan would have to concede this comes over as a little disingenuous, but bafflingly, the point is not pressed. Instead, her accusers move on to the seemingly trivial and obvious question of why she adopted a false name during the escape.

The former Queen’s cold, emotionless approach occasionally borders on irony,  giving away her withering contempt for her questioners. In perhaps my favourite of her answers during the trial (when she is again being pressed on the matter of being the ringmaster of the escape plan, and the fact that she opened a door at the Tuileries and made everyone go out), she replies that she “did not believe that the opening of a door could prove that a person directs the actions of another” (p14).

Her prosecutors push further (p14).

TRIBUNAL

Observed, that she never concealed for a moment her desire of destroying liberty; that she wanted to reign at any cost, and re-ascend the throne upon the corpses of the patriots.

MARIE ANTOINETTE

That they did not want to re-ascend the throne: That they were upon it; that they never had any other desire but the happiness of France. Be it happy: be it but happy! they would always be contented!

Somehow the spare third person of the trial record seems to heighten the drama of these exchanges, and draw out the tension between what is being said and what is being so carefully not said.

The prosecutors then move on to the question of whether Marie Antoinette had been in contact with the enemies of the Revolution, both foreign and the emigrated princes, and provided them with vital military information. This is probably Marie Antoinette’s most vulnerable point; there are reasons to believe she may have actually done this, and she clearly falters here (p15).

TRIBUNAL

You have held a correspondence with ci-devant French princes since their quitting France, and with the emigrants; you have conspired with them against the safety of the state.

MARIE ANTOINETTE

She never held any correspondence with any Frenchmen abroad; that with respect to her brothers, she might have written them one or two insignificant letters; but she does not believe she has; and recollects having often refused to do so.

Despite the fact that her confidence clearly deserts her here, and the answer she gives is evidently inadequate, this is remarkably not followed up, and the subject is immediately changed, leaving important questions unasked. If she has often refused to write letters, for example, who was trying to make her? Here, the crippling lack of evidence against Marie Antoinette is exposed, with the consequence that her accusers have no trump cards they can use to force more out of her. It simply comes down to their accusation versus her denial.

There are further telling moments, as when Marie Antoinette is asked (p16)…

You regret, without doubt that your son has lost a throne, which he might have ascended, if the people, at length enlightened upon their true rights, had not themselves crushed that throne?

MARIE ANTOINETTE

She shall never regret anything for her son, as long as her country is happy.

She seems to find strength in this simple strategy of insisting her only aim was the happiness of her country, and it’s one she holds to time and again in the trial. Indeed, her confidence seems to grow as she realises the paucity of evidence available to her prosecutors. She even goes so far, when challenged on rumours that she was kept in constant communication with the outside world whilst at the Temple, that “those who declare anything of the kind, dare not prove it” (p17).

The secret interrogation comes to an end without having obtained any killer evidence, or indeed anything much of real significance that can be used in the trial. In a poignant moment, Marie Antoinette is asked whether she needs to have counsel appointed by the court for her trial, and she replies that she does, because she ‘knows not any one” (p19).

Tronson Doucoudray and Claude Chaveau-Lagarde are named as her lawyers. Chaveau-Lagarde was perhaps a likely suspect for this job, having already established something of a reputation for defending revolutionary hate figures, including Charlotte Corday, Madame Roland, Jean Sylvain Bailly and several moderate Girondins. Showing great courage, and attracting all kinds of the wrong attention to himself at a time when blending into the background was by far the safest option if one wanted to remain attached to one’s head, Chaveau-Lagarde provided that basic legal support permitted to lawyers in the Revolutionary Tribunal, in cases which everyone knew were hopeless.

Marie Antoinette returned to her cell knowing that her trial would begin in just two days. Unlike her husband, who had been given weeks with his lawyers to prepare his defence, Marie Antoinette would have less than 24 hours, during which time they were not even aware of what charges were to be brought against her, and would have been under constant surveillance. Her lawyers would not be permitted to speak for her in court, so it is likely that in whatever time they had available their advice would have been more general, on how to stand up to the coming onslaught (of which the secret interrogation been just a taster), and how to frame her answers. Perhaps, with their hands tied so firmly behind their backs, the lawyers’ real contribution was psychological and supportive more than it was detailed or practical. In any event, when the trial began it would become clear that Marie Antoinette would hold to the instinctive course set in the secret interrogation, and was more mentally prepared for the key lines of questioning revealed during this ordeal. In some crucial ways, then, the secret interrogation had been far more beneficial to the former queen than it had her accusers.

Next time: the trial proper begins.

Share/Bookmark

In the first part of this guide to Marie Antoinette’s trial (the account of which you can read in full here) we looked at the course of events that took the royal family from being an essential, if awkward, part of a constitutional monarchy to being at first an obstacle to further change, then a magnet for popular hatred, then an irrelevance, and finally an enemy of the Revolution. Once you had entered the latter category, it was really only a matter of time before you were called for your appointment with Madame Guillotine.

By the time Marie Antoinette found herself in the prison of the Conciergerie in August 1793, she was without a doubt deep in the blackest period of her life. The king’s death had been a great blow to her – she seems to have entertained some hope that he might be reprieved, hopes that were only finally dashed when she heard the sound of drums and great cheer echoing round the streets, and she knew he was dead. From this point on she would be known as the Widow Capet, and she dressed accordingly in widow’s weeds. Her daughter was later to write

She no longer had any hope left in her heart or distinguished between life and death; sometimes she looked at us with a kind of compassion which was quite frightening.

Her physical health began to decline rapidly. By this time she was almost certainly suffering from tuberculosis, and the heavy bleeding that afflicted her may have been an early indicator of uterine cancer (as Antonia Fraser speculates). By this time most of the more legendary aspects of her personality had been stripped away – the airheaded gaiety, the extravagance, that often remarked upon glowing quality – leaving behind a cold, hard core of proud tenacity, a fierceness that had something in common with the popular depictions of her as a harpie, or a tigress. She never seems to have entirely abandoned hope, and her behaviour in the trial reveals some inward refusal to give even an inch of ground to her persecutors. Fraser argues that there were some grounds for hope. No queen in history had ever before been put on trial or executed, and there were precedents for royal women to be sent back to their native countries following the end of their marriages.

In Marie Antoinette’s case though, this seems highly unlikely to have ever been a real possibility, given her potency as a symbol of everything that the Revolution sought to expunge from the world, the strong belief in her active involvement in plots to destroy the Revolution (which would be a recurring theme in the trial) and her massive unpopularity with the increasingly vital sans-culottes. To his shame, even her nephew the Austrian Emperor showed little interest in the furtive negotiations which did take place over the possibility of exchanging the former queen for political prisoners. And it is known for certain that Marie Antoinette’s fate had been decided at a meeting of the Committee of Public Safety weeks before the trial began.

It’s crucial though to resist the tempatation to throw up your hands and bewail the trial as a travesty of justice, because it wasn’t. At least, no more than the other trials undertaken at the Revolutionary Tribunal. Indeed, the very ordinariness of Marie Antoinette’s trail was an important part of its symbolism. During the debate over the king’s death, Robespierre had said that she must be sent “before the courts, like all other persons charged with similar crimes”. Unlike her husband, her fate would not be debated before a full assembly of the nation’s elected representatives, and she would be given no opportunity to explain herself or reason with them. In short, there should be no indication that she mattered in any special way. This, for a former queen and daughter of Emperors, was punishment in itself.

In fact, my main tip before reading the trial is to turn your 21st century brain off, because it won’t help you here. I’m no expect on the vagaries of the French legal system, but there are a few things it’s important to remember about Marie Antoinette’s trial in the legal context of the time (these courtesy of an obscure book called The Trials of Five Queens by R. Storry Deans).

• French trials at the time (and to a lesser extent even now) were not litigious but inquisitional, meaning they didn’t consist of a prosecution formulating a charge against the accused which it was then required to prove. The trial was instead a more open-ended and general inquisition into the guilt and character of the accused.
• Almost nothing in Marie Antoinette’s trial would be admissible as evidence in an English court today, and much of it not even at that time. However, procedures like the secret interrogation before the trial (when the court was not in session and no jury present) were standard procedure in eighteenth century France.
• The distinction between thought and deed had not yet been firmly enshrined in law, so establishing that the accused had contemplated doing something, or even that they were the type of person who might contemplate it, was enough. Likewise, opinion, inference and hearsay were acceptable forms of evidence (and formed the bulk of Marie Antoinette’s trial, as concrete evidence is rarely provided).

Share/Bookmark

This month, you’ll find a piece I’ve written in Vintage Script, a new magazine dedicated to all things vintage, historical and retro. What’s most delightful about it is the range of different historical periods, as well as the different approaches taken to bringing them to life. In this month’s edition you’ll find stories on the history of tea time, flapper girls of the 1920s, Durham Cathedral and the truth behind the Scarlet Pimpernel. It really is well worth a read, so do please visit the web site and take a look.

The Versailles Menagerie during Louis XIV’s reign, by D’Aveline.

In an attempt to whet your appetite, here’s an extract from my article on the history of the Royal Menagerie at Versailles. You’ll have to take my word for it, but the stuff I’ve cut out here is stupendous, so you really should get the magazine!

We take up the story from Louis XIV’s death. Before the Sun King, the French Royals had not had a permanent menagerie but instead contented themselves with a band of exotic or entertaining animals which followed them around their various royal residences. Louis XIV established two permanent menageries – one at Vincennes and one at Versailles, each with a different purpose and personality. The Vincennes menagerie was used for dramatic fights, such as the battle between a tiger and an elephant staged to amuse the Persian ambassador in 1682. The Versailles menagerie, on the other hand, was a model of order and rationality, where the far more fortunate animals were intended for peaceful display and, as all things at the palace, to augment the glory and prestige of the king. The conflict between these two very different styles of menagerie reflected the conflicts in Louis’ personality and style of leadership, but by the end of his reign the Versailles style had clearly won out, and the Vincennes zoo was closed.

Map of Versailles, by Delagrive (1689-1757), 1746 (via Wikimedia Commons), with the location of the menagerie highlighted. Below, the former site of the menagerie today, from Google Maps.

View larger map

In some magical way Versailles transformed itself to match the character of the king at its heart, so when the Sun King died and was succeeded by his grandson Louis XV, everything changed. Louis XV was more interested in hunting animals than observing them in his menagerie, and his taste for exotic wildlife restricted itself more or less to Madame de Pompadour and his seraglio of royal mistresses. Animal gifts kept coming from every corner of the ever-expanding French trading empire, but the king lacked both the funds and the inclination to give them much of a welcome. When an elephant arrived in 1772, it was forced to walk more than three hundred miles from the coast to Versailles.

One can imagine the elephant was quite miffed about the debacle (but must have created quite a stir in the towns and villages along the road) and things got no better once it arrived at Versailles. The pond dug for the exotic birds to wade in was full of silt. The wall enclosing the rhinoceros which arrived two years earlier was literally crumbling (not a good thing, as the rhino was no doubt angered by visitors who laughed at its absurdly wrinkled skin). Even the animals in the once beautiful paintings which lined the walls of the observation room were faded and peeling. The elephant stuck it out for as long as possible, but in 1782, broke free of its enclosure and rampaged round the grounds of Versailles. Next morning, a strange new elephant-shaped island was found floating in the Grand Canal.

Sadly, the elephant died too late to witness the last gasp of the royal menagerie. Louis XVI had ascended the throne in 1775, and found a financial and political situation as neglected as the menagerie. Unlike his grandfather Louis XV, Louis XVI could not rely on winning charm to see him through – he had none. He was therefore much more attuned to symbolism, and strove constantly, in the face of an ever-deepening crisis, to project an image of undimmed power and royal prestige.

Although they never knew it, the animals of the menagerie were a perfect instrument for this. The very fact that they were there at all spoke eloquently of the scope and scale of the king’s influence. Overcoming the difficulties of finding and catching such rare and beautiful creatures, overcoming the problems of long distance travel and communication, overcoming the self-interest of every captain and sailor along the way who might have sold his precious cargo, the king had commanded that animals be brought, and they had come. The strength of his will even seemed to overcome death itself: such animals were notoriously difficult to keep alive on long voyages. Exotic birds especially had an irksome habit of dropping down dead when cannon fired, or simply pining away. Whispers began to circulate that the most beautiful birds of all simply could not live without their liberty.

Louis sent out a shopping list to his representatives around the world. “An elephant; 2 zebras, male and female; mandrill and baboon monkeys; 6 guineafoul”. Perhaps Louis wished to tame the zebras and teach them to draw his carriage, as some of his more flamboyant contemporaries did. But Louis was never to receive an elephant and only got one of the zebras he asked for, though the menagerie did benefit from an influx of new inmates, including a lion, a panther, some hyenas, a tiger, some ostriches and several kinds of monkey.

The popularity of the menagerie was also boosted by great vogue for the study of nature that flowered during Louis XVI’s reign. Naturalists had grown tired of studying the dusty tombs of Cabinets of Curiosity, where brown pickled fish bobbed in vinegar and faded birds stood stuffed in a peculiar imitation of life that seemed to startle the thought of death into everyone who looked at them. There was now, prompted by the bestselling work of Buffon, a desire to observe living animals. Now then, the animals of the menagerie had a new torment, as fashionable men and women toured the menagerie, staring deep into the eyes of monkeys and, with a pained expression, wondered aloud “What is it to be human?”. Nobody ever seemed to wonder what it is to be monkey.

As it turned out, of course, even if Louis had managed to obtain a hundred zebras to draw his carriage, they couldn’t have saved him from the coming of the Revolution. Perhaps the animals noticed a glow of torchlight up at the palace on the night in October 1789 when a crowd of thousands arrived to remove the royal family and take them back to Paris (henceforth to be caged and regarded with the same mixture of awed and disgusted curiosity that the inhabitants of the menagerie had been).

The menagerie must have been a sad and dispiritingly quiet place for the next couple of years, as history was written elsewhere, and the fate of a dwindling bunch of pampered pets was of no importance. But, in a perverse way, the violence and inhumanity of the revolution was to foster a new concern for these animals. After a few years, with the Terror in full flow, the bourgeois leaders of the Revolution began to grow concerned that the populace was becoming too accustomed to blood, too wild. They needed to be brought back to the civilising influence of orderly society – and what better way to demonstrate its advantages than through the example of these wild animals. If even a lion, when it is well cared for by enlightened rulers, can be tamed and made gentle, then there’s hope for anyone. This attitude to animals was extraordinary: in 1794, the Paris Commune received complaints about ‘disgusting displays’ of animals in the Place de la Révolution, but none about the twenty guillotinings that took place in the same square every day.

At the last minute, the few remaining animals of the royal menagerie, which had been due to be killed and stuffed, were saved, and made a part of plans for a new state menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Following a ban on animal shows, the authorities had sent out agents to round up all wild animals being kept or sold in Paris for this purpose. The only problem was, there was nowhere to put them except the basement of the museum at the Jardins des Plantes.

The wrinkly rhinoceros died before it could make the journey (run through, according to legend, by a revolutionary’s sabre), but the lion from Versailles was taken to Paris in 1794, and found itself in a room full of the motliest collection of animals since the Ark. Here was a leopard, there a sea lion. Perched on a crate were three eagles, bleating in the corner were three sheep with various lurid deformities, and god-knows-where was what had been promised to be a sea lion when the harassed zookeeper agreed to take it on, but was discovered on arrival to be a polar bear. There were in total 32 mammals and 26 birds.

Gradually a permanent, if very basic, home for these forlorn creatures was put together, and, amid trumpeting revolutionary rhetoric that the animals would “no longer wear on their brows, as in the menageries built by the pomp of kings, the brand of slavery”, its doors were opened to the public. This new, state menagerie was intended to be a pacifying haven of contemplation and rational study. It didn’t quite work out that way. As soon as the doors opened, the citizens of Paris made a beeline for the old lion from Versailles. They pulled at his fur, and shouted abuse when he tried to sleep, and spat at him because, they said, he used to be a king too.

The lion bore his torment for a short while, but in the famine-frosted winter of 1795, when there was no money for food and none to buy anyway, half the animals died, the lion probably among them. After this time, conditions at the menagerie slowly improved, and with the conquests of Napoleon, it was repopulated with inhabitants from new outposts of empire.

Today, there’s no trace of the menagerie beneath the impeccably manicured lawns of Versailles, but a piece of it survives. If you go to the Jardins des Plantes, past the small zoo which still survives and into the Natural History Museum, you’ll find a large glass case, containing a leathery rhinoceros, the first to ever be stuffed and preserved. Today people file by and study him quietly, as civilised and dispassionate as they were always meant to be, save perhaps for the occasional chuckle at his absurdly wrinkly skin. But this is an extraordinary survivor, called across the sea by the last pulse of royal power from France, witness to the end of an era, one of the last beings ever to truly live at Versailles, victim of the violence of the revolution – and yet, here he is. Through all the storms of history and politics, the revolutions and counter-revolutions, monarchies and republics, wars and peaces, the rhinoceros has stood safe in its glass case. Even today, the Versailles menagerie is drawing long-severed worlds into strange meetings.

Louis XV’s rhinoceros, at the Natural History Museum in Paris.

The rhinoceros was recently featured in an exhibition at Versailles, ‘Sciences and Curiosities at the Court of Versailles, which I’m bereft at having missed. This nice little video was made to coincide with the exhibition.

More

•  ‘Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris’ (2002) by Louise E. Robbins has lots more fascinating detail on the menagerie, and 18th century Parisians’ relationship with animals.

Share/Bookmark

To coincide with the English account of Marie Antoinette’s trial I uploaded last time, today I begin a guide to reading what can be a confusing and obscure document, and understanding this fascinating event in context.

The background to the trial 

To some extent ever since the Royal Family had been forcibly removed from Versailles and taken to Paris in October 1789, and much more urgently since the failed attempt by the family to escape the city in June 1791, the fate of monarchy in France had been one of the Revolution’s more awkward unanswered questions. When the family was captured at Varennes during the botched escape and returned to Paris, the crowds that lined the streets to watch greeted them in total, uneasy silence – forbidden to make a sound either to cheer or harass the captives.

The return of the Royal Family to Paris, after the disastrous flight to Varennes. By Jean Duplessis-Bertaux, after a drawing by Jean-Louis Prieur, 1791.

Marie Antoinette in 1791, painted by Alexandre Kucharski. Already a sombre-looking figure, legend has it her hair turned white overnight during the return from Varennes.

From this point on, the king was in reality no more than a figurehead in what was still technically a constitutional monarchy. Then on 10th August 1792, large crowds stormed the Tuileries Palace (then located next to the Louvre), and the Royal Family was forced to flee to the protection of the Legislative Assembly. The next day, Louis and Marie Antoinette sat in the Assembly and listened as the country was declared a republic and the position of king and queen ceased to exist. They would henceforth be known as Citoyen and Citoyenne Capet (a title both objected to as being inaccurate, Louis being of the House of Bourbon not the extinct medieval dynasty of Capet).

The assault on the Tuileries Palace, by Jean Duplessis-Bertaux, 1793.

Inevitability is such a tasty spice to season history with, though often it tends to overwhelm the subtlety and complexity of the other flavours always present. In this case though, it seems accurate to say that the fate of the former king and queen was sealed during that session of the Legislative Assembly. Stripped of their powers, their necessity to the state and their mystique, every plausible scenario had to end in their death. Alive, they simply posed an unacceptable threat to the stability of the Revolution, and they could never have been allowed into exile, where they could regroup with the existing counter-revolutionary forces.

Despite this, the decision to execute Louis was not an easy one to take, even with the disastrous Brunswick Manifesto, a statement by the invading Imperial and Prussian powers which threatened to wreak ‘an ever memorable vengeance by delivering over the city of Paris to military execution and complete destruction’ unless the royals were released unharmed. Louis’ trial was held before the full convention, and most observers agreed that he acquitted himself with affecting dignity, even if it was somewhat shabby and increasingly sad. The guilty verdict on ”conspiracy against the public liberty and the general safety” was assured from the start, but the vote on the sentence was surprisingly close. 361 voted for immediate execution (plus a further 72 for a delayed execution), 288 against.

The execution of Louis XVI.

The king’s death in January 1793 removed any legal, constitutional, or practical obstacle standing in the way of executing Marie Antoinette too. The sympathy that the king was still able to engender was not to be a factor in proceedings against the queen, who was widely and bitterly reviled by the population at large, and held to be actively working against the Revolution. For this reason, many of even the best biographies of Marie Antoinette tend to dismiss her trial simply as a sham, affording it a couple of pages, perhaps, but otherwise seeing it as a blip in her inexorable descent towards the guillotine. This fails to do the event justice, as though it quite clearly was a sham in the sense that the verdict was never in doubt, that doesn’t make it any less interesting, both as a penetrating insight into the character of Marie Antoinette in this final stage of her life, and into the attitudes of the revolutionary authorities who were to try her.

In the time between the execution of the king and the trial of Marie Antoinette, significant developments radically altered the atmosphere in Paris and gave an added sense of urgency to the Revolution. The Reign of Terror began, which saw rapid and violent strikes against the forces of counter-revolution both within and outside France, as well as seismic shifts in political power away from Danton and towards Robespierre. The Vendée rose in revolt against the revolutionary government; a revolt which was so firmly suppressed that somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 lives were lost on both sides in the fighting. During the summer of 1793 Marseille, Bordeaux, Lyon were all in conflict with the Convention, and the port of Toulon surrendered to the British. In July, Marat was assassinated.

The fighting in the Vendée, a later (1853) painting by Jean Sorieul.

As summer turned to autumn, a kind of hysteria prevailed throughout France. The revolutionary authorities were almost entirely focused on securing control, and sealing off France from the chaos that surrounded it and threatened to eat it up from within. With so much confusion, the trial of Marie Antoinette suddenly seemed wonderfully controllable and powerfully symbolic – a chance for uncomplicated, visceral, unifying vengeance against a clear enemy of the revolution, and to sever one of the last remaining links to the ancien régime.

In August, Marie Antoinette was moved from her prison in the Temple Tower to the Conciergerie prison on the Ile-de-la-Cité, the home of the Revolutionary Tribunal. There she waited, never sure of what was happening, until on 13th October 1793 she was informed that her trial would commence in one day’s time.

Next time: The Trial Begins

Share/Bookmark

If there’s one thing everyone knows about Marie Antoinette, it’s that unfortunate cake remark (which, of course, there’s no reason at all to believe she ever said). If there’s a second thing, it’s that she got her head chopped off. A lie and an ending – the foundations of our conceptions of the entire life of a woman. So much is left out of that dessicated biography – good and bad, edifying and embarassing, important and trivial. But frankly, even when you do begin to learn more, even when you read one of the excellent biographies (even the superlative one by historian heartthrob Antonia Frasier) she remains a pretty enigmatic woman, almost impossible to pin down. So much about her life and character seems so contradictory, and to vary so wildly in different accounts, that it’s very hard to emerge with any feeling of knowing her.

There are though a few pivotal events in her life where her character suddenly crystallises before your eyes, and she practically seems to walk into the room. Her trial is certainly the most powerful of these moments, but frustratingly it’s probably one of the least known elements of her life story. In all the hoopla of ‘Marie Antoinette got her head chopped off’, it’s easy to lose sight of basic questions like how that came to happen or precisely why. For this reason and many others the trial record makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the real Marie Antoinette, and more widely anyone interested in the Revolution as a whole. You might say I’m a bit of a fan – so much so, in fact, that I wrote a play about the trial a couple of years ago.

I’m going to write more about the trial in my next post, but for now I wanted to simply post this English account of the proceedings at the trial, published in 1793, the year after the trial, which I’ve scanned from an existing copy. I’m very excited to make this available, as I’ve been unable to find an English account freely available online, and it’s a document that deserves to be available to all.

Click here to download the file as a PDF.

Although, as you’ll see, the preface and epilogue added to the record in this edition make the compiler’s sympathies for Marie Antoinette perfectly plain, the account of the trial itself tallies well with other published versions, and this one is most likely based on the accounts which appeared in English newspapers at the time. It is, as far as all my research shows, an authentic account of the proceedings. Also included are a brief  biographical sketch, the ‘secret interrogatories’ (questioning of Marie Antoinette that occurred in private before the trial itself), a description of her execution and events after the trial was closed, and a lamentation for the dead Queen.

I’m biting my tongue to stop myself talking more about it, because it’s remarkable enough to speak for itself and that’s what I want it to do. But I’ll be back next week with more details on the story of the trial, its more extraordinary moments, and its cast of characters.

Share/Bookmark