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18th Century French History History Royal History Uncategorized

Marie Antoinette on Trial: Your Cut-Out-and-Keep Guide to Reading the Trial, Part 4

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. However, if you go now to this website you’ll easily get in contact with the best lawyers near you.

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.

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18th Century French History Historical Places Paris Uncategorized

Marie Antoinette on Trial: A Contemporary English Account to Read Online

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.

http://cultureandstuff.com/Authentic_Trial_at_Large_of_Marie_Antoinette_via_Cultureandstuff.pdf

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.

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18th Century French History Historical Places History Lost Paris Paris Uncategorized

Lost Paris: A snapshot of 1730s Paris

This wonderful, 33 megapixel, zoomable marvel is known as the Turgot Map of Paris, and it’s a remarkable document in all sorts of ways. I like to imagine that were you to be offered the chance to drift above Paris in a hot air balloon in the 1730s (disregarding the fact that this was impossible, the Montgolfier brothers being still but a twinkle in their parents eyes) the scene before you would look very like this. Or maybe it’s more like what it would be like to be some all-powerful God, with the world laid at your feet and called to attention for your inspection. The map was commissioned Michel-Étienne Turgot, then prévôt des marchands de Paris (roughly equivalent to the city’s mayor) and created by Louis Bretez. And Turgot certainly got his money’s worth. The completed map was huge, filling 21 sheets and reproducing the city in incredible detail. I recommend you switch the widget to fullscreen mode, scroll and zoom around, and get lost inside it for a while. The map strikes us as odd in several respects. Firstly, it’s oriented very differently from any map of Paris we’re used to, with the viewer facing east. Then there’s the birdseye perspective, technically known as perspective cavaliere, this means that buildings of the same size are shown at the same size on the map, no matter how far away they are. Then there’s the fact that what we see is recognisably Paris, but not Paris as we know it. It’s a stark reminder of the scope and scale of the changes made to Paris under Haussmann and Napoleon III, which have changed so fundamentally the essence of the city. Mostly though, it’s the sheer detail of the thing that startles- enough to give you the slightly eerie sense that you’re looking at a city captured in some crystaline lava flow, and preserved for all time. Turgot set out to record the city as it was, without a window or a leaf out of place, and on one level he succeeded admirably. During his two years drafting the map, he was granted extraordinary access to the city, even being allowed inside the aristocratic hôtels, normally cut-off from public view by their fortress-like walls. As a result, the map is full of vivid and authentic detail, and examining it is as addictive as Where’s Wally (Waldo). There are views of sights such as the Louvre, then flanked by the Tuileries Palace, surrounded by a hodgepodge of medieval housing, and forming the western boundary of developed Paris, with nothing beyond but trees subjected to ever-decreasing levels of manicure, and then waves of green fields. Montmartre is still nothing more than a village, its windmills still real and none rouge. The massive, unforgiving Bastille dominates its neighbourhood. Individual boats are depicted on a river teeming with activity. And there’s a reminder that Haussmann was not the only man who ever dreamed of reshaping Paris – already Henry IV’s Place Royale and Louis XIV’s Place Vendôme stand out from the muddle of streets that surround them – harbingers of the orderly, picture-perfect Paris of the future. Perhaps the reason the map feels slightly disconcerting is because of what’s not there. There’s so much detail and reality in the buildings, and yet slicing through them are clean, white roads. Not only do these streets seem in many places far wider, straighter and clearer than they almost certainly were in real life, there’s also something lifeless and sterile about them. The streets of Paris in the 1730s were many things, but clean was not one of them. Turgot clearly had a political purpose in commissioning the map, and aimed to show Paris as a modern, well-governed, well-maintained city under the control of the authorities. Even the very act of completing such an extraordinary work was testament to the resources available to the city’s elite. Consequently, the Pont Neuf is recorded in exacting architectural detail, but we get no sense of the raucous street life that thrived there. Eagle eyes can spot the Cimetière des Innocents near Les Halles in the centre of the city, but there’s nothing to suggest the supreme squalor of the place, the ground so full of corpses that they frequently burst out into the cellars of nearby buildings. And only when you look at the banks of the Seine, with the streaks of mud that intrude onto the clean white paper of the riverside, do you get a hint of the dirt and filth, the all-pervading brown that would have been the colour of Paris, and the stench that would have ruined that anachronistic balloon ride. The map is at once a tantalising and rare glimpse of a lost Paris at a precise moment in its history, and a fantasy – a Paris that never, quite, was. Incidentally, you can buy huge reproductions of this map in the UK here and in the US here. Oh how I lust after these! And if big, zoomable, historical maps are your bag, you might just explode with happiness if you visit the BIG Map Blog.

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18th Century Biography French History History Royal History

Marie Antoinette and her Children: The mystery and the history of Louis Charles in the tower. Part 1

Louis Charles mystery Marie Antoinette

On the morning of 11th August 1792, an exhausted and increasingly sweaty royal family sat in the reporters’ box of the National Assembly, a stone’s throw from the Seine in Paris. The night before, the Tuileries (the 16th-century royal palace near the Louvre which had been their residence since they were removed from Versailles in 1789) had been invaded by the people, and a chaotic and brutal battled ensued. The king had been forced to flee the palace and seek refuge with the Assembly.

As debate raged around them over the future of the monarchy, one thing was already clear. The Tuileries was no longer a suitable residence for the royal family, and an alternative must be found urgently. And so it was that on 13th August, Louis, Marie Antoinette and their children were transported to the Temple. This would have come as no great surprise to Marie Antoinette, indeed she had predicted that they would ultimately be moved there several months before it came to pass. But it was nonetheless a frightening development. Marie Antoinette had always disliked the Temple – a complex of buildings including a rather lovely seventeenth-century palace and the far more ominous Tower, a decaying hulk of a building constructed by the Knights Templar in the 12th century. Earlier in her life, Marie Antoinette was even said to have suggested to her brother-in-law (then owner of the palace) that the Tower should be knocked down.

The Temple, Marie Antoinette's prison
The Temple Tower

The prospect of life in the Temple was very different to the one they had known in the Tuileries. Though certainly well past its best, and a precipitous step down from Versailles, the Tuileries was at least a royal palace, and while they had been tucked away there, a sort of calm had descended, allowing questions over the exact status of the royal family to be conveniently postponed or half-answered. The family had enjoyed considerable independence in the Tuileries, where there was space to walk outside and to house supporters, and enough leeway for many of the traditions and rites of Versailles to continue in some form or another. Security had even been lax enough to allow the royal party to make its ill-fated escape attempt earlier in the year.

The Temple, it was clear to everyone, was to allow none of this ambiguity. In moving to the Temple, Marie Antoinette and her family were being imprisoned, physically and psychologically. Though their quarters were cramped, damp and cold, there were still touches of luxury in their furnishings, meals continued to be lavish, and the King was allowed his own study. What made the real difference was that the King and Queen were now strictly monitored and controlled by jailers who openly disrespected them, and clearly enjoyed inflicting what Antonia Fraser calls ‘petty humilations’ on them whenever possible. What’s more, any chance of escape, except in the most fervid daydreams of die-hard monarchists and paranoid republicans, had now well and truly passed. Most painful of all for the king and queen must have been the dawning realisation that they were now powerless – locked out of the way whilst their fate, and that of France, was being decided elsewhere.

From now on, events moved rapidly. On 21st September, the National Assembly declared France a republic, and abolished the monarchy – adding new urgency to the question of what should be done with its former monarchs. In October, Louis was separated from his family in preparation for trial. His jailers presented him with a choice – he could be allowed to see his children during this time, or they could be left with Marie Antoinette, but it must be one or the other. They would not be allowed to see both parents. Louis chose to leave the children with their mother, and he would be reunited with his family just one more time, on the night before his execution on 21st January 1793. He bade them a tearful farewell, but promised to see them again the next morning before he was taken away.

Louis was fascinated by history, and had spent much of his life reading history books. Some observers had wondered why, because the king had never seemed to learn much from it. But recently he had been fixated on the story of Charles I of England, and in particular the fearless and noble way he met his own execution. It was said that Charles had secretly worn two overshirts as he stepped onto the scaffold that January morning, so that his people would not see him shiver from cold and think him afraid. Louis was determined that his people should not see him shiver, finding, as he faced his death, a resolution and strength he had so often lacked in life.

This newfound resilience called upon all of Louis’ emotional reserves, so when dawn came, he found himself unable to face the strain of of seeing his family again. He broke his promise. Marie Antoinette and her children waited in the Tower, unaware of what was going on. It was only when they heard drums and a huge cheer echoing round the streets that they knew Louis was dead. Later, some would claim that in that instant Marie Antoinette turned to her son Louis-Charles and said ‘The king is dead, long live the king’, expressing the tradition that monarchy itself never dies – kings come and go, but kingship passes down a divinely-ordained and unbroken ancient line.

The comment seems emotionally out of place, but whether or not Marie Antoinette actually said it, it was true that, with French law forbidding a woman to hold the crown, for those unwilling to accept that monarchy in France was a thing of the past, the seven-year-old Louis Charles had suddenly become King Louis XVII.

Louis Charles, son of Marie Antoinette
Louis Charles, painted in 1792 by Alexander Kucharsky

Louis Charles can’t have remembered much of life before the revolution, and in one way or another conflict had overshadowed his whole life. Portraits of the boy show an angelic and spirited but delicate looking child, and this matches well with the reports of everyone who knew him. He was said to be loyal and loving, and his stubborn pride was certainly forgiveable (indeed, almost a requirement) in a dauphin of France. He was adored by his parents and his sisters, and proved capable of charming even his most implacable enemies. The revolution would severely test the boy, and though he endured numerous terrifying episodes in which he and his family could easily have been killed, he did not emerge unscathed. These experiences seem in particular to have reinforced a pair of key character traits which Marie Antoinette and others had noted despairingly even before the upheavals of 1789. Firstly, Louis Charles had always been easily scared. At Versailles, more often than not it was the sound of dogs that startled him, but by 1793 his nerves had become so frayed that he cowered at almost any disturbance. Secondly, Louis Charles, like many young boys, had a tendency to repeat things that he had heard too freely, adding his own invented details to enhance the telling, without consciously meaning to lie. This it seems was a symptom of a more general desire to please, and to be loved.

This particular combination of character traits, though not exactly unusual in a boy of his age, was to prove disastrous in the new phase of Louis Charles’ life that was now beginning. With his father dead and mistrust and hatred for Marie Antoinette as widespread as ever, it was decided that the boy should be separated from his mother. This was done in June, without warning. When men entered to take him away, Marie Antoinette clung to her son for over an hour, refusing to release him even when her life was threatened. Only when the guards shifted tactic and threatened her daughter did Marie Antoinette finally relent.

Louis Charles now posed a problem for the revolutionary authorities. He was too young to be tried like his father, and he could certainly not be allowed to go into exile, where he would provide the counter-revolutionaries with a potent figurehead. And though the problem of his father had been solved by killing him, doing the same to this cherubic, innocent boy would present a most unpleasant image of the revolution to the world, and could inspire a backlash of monarchist sympathy. So, it seems to have been decided, the only thing to do with Louis Charles was to keep him out of sight of the public and hope that in time he would be forgotten. More deliciously for some, a close, solitary imprisonment even presented the tantalising possibility that Louis Charles might be made to forget himself. The Commune, which oversaw the imprisonment of Louis Charles, spoke explicitly in terms of a ‘re-education’, and the ultimate hope was that the boy should ‘lose the recollection of his royalty’, in the words of Jacques-René Hébert, and become a revolutionary.

The man chosen for this ‘re-education’ would be, in any other circumstances, an unlikely tutor. Antoine Simon was one of life’s failures, making a mess of everything he tried his hand at. Training initially as a shoemaker, nobody was interested in buying his wares, and his cheap tavern by the Seine proved equally disastrous. His luck seemed in when his first wife died and by some miracle he managed to attract another who came with a hefty dowry attached, but this too was soon frittered away. Rather than accepting that his own laziness and lack of business acumen had been the primary cause of the string of failures that riddled his adult life, Simon became increasingly angry and bitter, blaming anyone but himself for keeping him from the success he richly deserved. The Revolution was a gift to Simon, dovetailing nicely with his paranoid conspiracy theories, encouraging him to paint the aristocracy as being responsible for keeping men like him in their lowly stations. Even in the midst of this revolution, dominated by legendary characters and awesome personalities, Simon’s commitment and zeal marked him out, and he was soon noticed by those in authority. Simon was a man who would put the revolution above anything, and would not allow sentiment or affection to prevent him from following orders. Consequently when Jacques-René Hébert and his superiors at the Commune were searching for a man to watch over Louis Charles and break his royal spirit, Simon was a natural choice. One can only imagine Simon’s feelings on discovering his new destiny. He had spent his life railing impotently against the aristocratic Hydra laying waste to his hopes and dreams. Now one of its last remaining heads was his to control – and destroy.

Louis Charles’ re-education could not begin immediately as for the first few days he simply huddled in a corner, weeping uncontrollably, terrified by the slightest noise. Eventually though, things began to settle into a routine, and at least in this early stage, Louis Charles was not treated too badly. He was washed and his clothes were cleaned, he was given toys and sometimes even got to play with the laundry woman’s daughter. He was allowed outside into a small garden for air, and on one of these occasions Louis Charles found the courage to demand of some officials who had come to see him ‘I want to know what law you are using that says I should be separated from my mother… Show me this law, I want to see it!. Louis Charles’ short walk to the garden took him directly past Marie Antoinette’s cell, and if she craned her neck to a certain crack in the wall she could catch the merest glimpse of him as he walked by. Marie Thérèse wrote later that her mother would stand for hours with her eye crammed against that crack, waiting to see her son – ‘it was her sole hope, her sole occupation’.

In these early days of his isolation, there seems to have been some uncertainty about what exactly was to be done with Louis Charles. Simon didn’t like uncertainty, and resolved to clarify the situation. In July he went to the Commune, demanding what their intentions were for the boy. Their answer was clear and unequivocal – ‘We want to get rid of him!’.

From this point on the life of Louis Charles took a far more sinister turn.

Click here for part 2 of this story >>

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Marie Antoinette and her Children: A new, multi-part series on Culture&Stuff

In 1786, Marie Antoinette and her children posed for a portrait by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun (click the image above for the full version). At first glance, the resulting picture presents a happy image. Madame Royale gazes lovingly up at her mother, the infant Duc de Normandie bounces on her lap, and the Dauphin looks every inch the angelic heir to the throne of France. This is an image of the family Marie Antoinette always longed for, and a vision of the Queen as she wished herself to be seen.

But look closer and all is not quite as it should be. The young dauphin points so proudly and so invitingly, but leads our eye to a gaping hole at the centre of the picture. When the portrait was first painted, the crib was occupied by another baby, Marie Antoinette’s most recent child, Madame Sophie. Less than a year later, Madame Sophie was dead, and thoughts of her wretched life and early death caused Marie Antoinette so much pain that Sophie was painted out of the picture.

The image that was left is a haunting and somehow apt visual metaphor for Marie Antoinette’s deeply troubled relationship with children. العاب كازينو مجانية From the first days of her own childhood to her execution, and even beyond in the murky waters of her reputation, children – both absent and present, real and imagined – seem peculiarly to have defined Marie Antoinette. It is this sometimes joyous but more often painful relationship that I will examine in the next few weeks in a series of new posts, focusing especially on the lesser-known aspects of Marie Antoinette’s story. ارقام حظ برج الدلو Posts will include…

  • Marie Antoinette’s adopted children – the extraordinary story of the children Marie Antoinette took into her family, and what happened to them when the Revolution began.
  • The treatment of the dauphin Louis Charles when separated from his mother in the prison at the Temple.
  • How the image of Marie Antoinette as a mother was dramatically subverted and used against her in her trial. كم عدد بطولات مانشستر سيتي
  • The Legend of Louis Charles – though the official story holds that he died in prison in 1795, persistent and increasingly wild rumours emerged that he had escaped, and many figures popped up all over the world claiming to be the true Louis XVII.
  • Aftermath: The story of Marie Thérèse, the eldest of Marie Antoinette’s children, and the only member of the immediate family to survive the revolution.