524 - Join Us in France Travel Podcast

Categories: French Culture, French History

Discussed in this Episode

Vienna
Austria
Empress Maria Theresa
Louis XVI
Versailles
Petit Trianon
Queen’s Hamlet
Conciergerie
Place de la Révolution
Place de la Concorde
Temple Tower
Saint-Denis
Louis XV
Madame du Barry
Count Axel de Fersen
Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun
Joseph II
Louis Joseph
Louis Charles
Sophie
Elisabeth
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Olympe de Gouges
Robespierre
Necker
Madame de la Motte
Cardinal de Rohan
The Diamond Necklace Affair
Varennes
The National Assembly
The Terreur
Louis XVIII
Switzerland
England
Saint-Denis Basilica

[00:00:15] Annie: This is Join Us in France, episode 524, cinq cent vingt quatre. Bonjour, I’m Annie Sargent, and Join Us in France is the podcast where we take a conversational journey through the beauty, culture, and flavors of France.

Today’s Episode

[00:00:30] Annie: Today, I bring you a conversation with Elyse Rivin of Toulouse Guided Walks about the life of Marie-Antoinette.

We explore her controversial legacy, her struggles with royalty, and her tragic ending.

Join us as we peel back the layers of one of history’s most fascinating and misunderstood figures.

Thank you Donors and Listeners

[00:00:51] Annie: This podcast is supported by donors and listeners who buy my tours and services, including my Itinerary Consult Service, my GPS self-guided tours of Paris on the VoiceMap app,

or come and spend 10 days with me and Elyse at the bootcamp. You can browse all of that at my boutique: joinusinfrance.com/boutique.

And Patreon supporters get new episodes as soon as they are ready and ad-free. If that sounds good to you, be like them, follow the link in the show notes.

I’m still running a 20% discount on monthly and yearly Patreon tiers until Christmas Day, for those of you who want to sign up or perhaps gift a membership at a great price. Go to patreon.com/joinus for details.

For the magazine part of the podcast, after my chat with Elyse today, I’ll bring you an update on how to get tickets to Notre Dame de Paris, which I know a lot of you are looking forward to visiting. I have to keep it short because our conversation on Marie-Antoinette went long, but this is stuff you really need to understand.

Bonjour, Elyse.

Bonjour, Annie!

Wonderful topic today. Well, good, interesting, kind of sad at the end.

[00:02:14] Elyse: Kind of sad at the end.

Marie-Antoinette’s Early Life

[00:02:15] Annie: We’re talking about Marie-Antoinette, a very fascinating woman. I just finished a long book about her by Antonia Fraser.

[00:02:24] Elyse: Oh, wonderful writer.

[00:02:25] Annie: A very long book, very interesting. And, you know, I think she’s a fascinating person and I’m glad we’re finally getting to talk about her.

[00:02:34] Elyse: Yeah. I think that probably everybody has heard of Marie-Antoinette, and I would guess that some people have a vague idea of first of all, who she was, and of course, what happened to her and what her life was like. But it is a fact that she is extremely controversial, and she’s someone who, I think there’s a lot of ambiguity about her and about her existence, and what she was and what she did, and she’s a source of endless conversation, even 200 years later.

[00:03:09] Annie: Yeah, she’s become an icon for style and for the finer things of life. I’m sure we’ll get to talk about why that is, how that came to be.

[00:03:22] Elyse: She’s both an icon for style, which of course takes us to certain recent movies that have been made about her. And at the same time, vilified as the example of the absolutely egocentric, selfish monarch who couldn’t care less about the people.

[00:03:38] Annie: Right. Her reputation played a big role in the end of her life. And this reputation you know, it was fed by people who were not very nice to her.

[00:03:49] Elyse: Not very nice, not very nice, and ultimately a lot of them were just plain old jealous.

[00:03:54] Annie: Yes, it was jealousy. It was ignorance. It was also a question of bigotry. They didn’t like the fact that she was Austrian.

[00:04:01] Elyse: That’s right, she was the foreigner.

[00:04:03] Annie: Yeah, it made it, it played a big role in all of this.

Do tell, Elyse!

[00:04:07] Elyse: Do tell. Well, Marie-Antoinette, her full name being, marie-Antoinette Joseph Jeanne de Habsburg Lorraine, She was born in Vienna, Austria. Her mother was the Empress, Empress, Empress, Empress. I can’t even figure out if I’m supposed to say Empress or Impératrice.

I don’t know!

[00:04:30] Annie: Well, Impératrice is French.

[00:04:32] Elyse: Impératrice is French.

[00:04:33] Annie: It is Empress in English, Impératrice in French.

[00:04:36] Elyse: I like Impératrice better somehow. Anyway, her mother was Marie Thérèse, the Empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, one of the most powerful and influential people in the 18th century in Europe.

And Marie-Antoinette was, hold on everybody, the 14th child of 15 children.

[00:05:00] Annie: Right.

[00:05:00] Elyse: All of whom lived, which is utterly remarkable.

[00:05:04] Annie: Definitely remarkable, yes.

[00:05:05] Elyse: And she was raised, like all of her sisters, to be a political pawn. She was raised to be married off to one member of royalty or another. And this was the destiny of every single member of her family.

Her mother was very clear about this from the beginning. This was the role of this family. And they were brought up with an idea, which of course stayed with her, I think, probably her entire life, which was that this was a God given destiny to be a member of the royalty. And certainly it seems from everything everybody has ever written about her, that she just accepted this… this destiny in her life.

She was not very well educated, which is one of the things I find very interesting. She was taught to play music, to love dance and theater and well, be well dressed, which of course became one of the major elements of her existence. But she was not given a solid education, and could barely read and write.

[00:06:13] Annie: Right, when she arrived at the French court, they were a little bit surprised that she was not a reader, because in those days you had to pass the time and there was no TV, there was no internet, you know, people read. And eventually, they got her used to reading kind of, the romance novels of the time, the light easy reads of the time. But she…, when she was required to read something more arduous, she would ask someone to read it to her.

And she could pay attention for, you know, a good long time. But when reading herself, she preferred the light stories that were essentially the romance novels of the time. Yeah, I mean, they still hold a lot of interest today, so…

Marriage and Arrival in France

[00:06:58] Elyse: Now, Marie-Antoinette was betrothed, and I love that word, I don’t know why, she was betrothed to the Dauphin of France, that is the first son of the king, who is the one who became, of course, Louis XVI.

She was betrothed to him, that is the marriage was arranged, and the contracts were signed when she was seven years old.

Marie Thérèse, her mother, made sure that each one of her daughters had a marriage arranged when they were very young. And interestingly enough, the arrangement of the marriage between Marie-Antoinette and Louis, the Dauphin, which is the term used for the first son who is destined to be the king, went against, as they would say in French, Contre Nature, that is, the French and the Austrians were enemies and had been enemies for a very long time.

And this was a way for Maria Therese to create a peace contract basically between the two countries so that they in turn could join forces and be enemies of England and Spain, so…

All this is manipulation and calculation, and of course Marie-Antoinette had nothing to say about it, and who knows if she even really put up any protests about it. There was apparently only one of her sisters who, by dint of having a very strong character, convinced her mother that she could marry the man of her choice.

But Marie-Antoinette seems to have been someone who was relatively passive and just accepted her destiny.

[00:08:26] Annie: Right, and she had a very strong willed mother who, like you mentioned before, was just determined to have her daughters be the rulers of Europe. She wanted to place them strategically and she insisted, there was a lot of correspondence between Marie Thérèse and Marie-Antoinette, her daughter, and she insisted on like tracking her daughter’s periods.

She wanted to know when she was going to be fertile, and she wanted to know the details of what was happening with the king, and things like she was… she was a piece of work, that woman.

[00:09:01] Elyse: She was extreme. She was one of the most influential and powerful people of the entire 18th century in Western Europe.

Life at the French Court

[00:09:07] Elyse: But what I find fascinating… so here we are, so Marie-Antoinette is betrothed to Louis. Of course, she has never met him. And when she is 14 and three months, she has her period. And that is the moment at which they announced that the marriage can take place.

[00:09:27] Annie: Right, she was a womb. That woman was a womb. And of course, her mother enforced that, and seeing that the mother herself had 14 children, it’s not surprising. This is what happens in the world to this day in certain cultures, this is what women do.

They have babies, the end.

[00:09:46] Elyse: Yes, unfortunately that is true. In 1770, she was married by procuration.

She was married in absentiato Louis, and then two days later left Vienna and went with her entourage to the border between, what was of course at this point, the southern parts of Germany, part of the Austrian empire, to the frontier between France and her empire.

And this is just, this is actually incredible, I re-read this about four times to really, truly put this into my head. This is the moment when she sees Louis for the first time. Well, that we know from other stories about royalty in the past that this is not so unusual. However, they make her strip, they have her take off every piece of clothing that comes from Vienna.

They tell her that from now on she will be French and she must wear French clothing. And of all the ladies in waiting and the people who come with her, they allow her to keep only two. And she was told when she was younger that she would never be accepted as the wife of the Dauphin, unless she learned French.

So she did indeed learn some French. And in spite of her lack of formal education, she apparently did speak in French to Louis when she met him for the first time and insisted from then on that she be able to speak French with the people of the court. But the French people and most of the people in the court, resented the fact that there was going to be a foreigner, and particularly an Austrian, who was going to marry into the family.

[00:11:20] Annie: Right, so this has to do with just, you know, prejudices, and politics,

But people in France really hated the Austrians, and the Germans in general, and wanted nothing to do with that part of reality, I guess. It must have been really hard for a little girl that was born to believe, like when you are the child of a king, that you know, you’re on top of the world, you’re the cat’s meow, and then she gets to France and she’s like, stripped of all that sort of, I mean, she’s both admired, feared and debased.

It’s really strange what they did to her.

[00:11:59] Elyse: It is extremely strange. When you consider that most of the kings for centuries had intermarried with English princesses, and Spanish princesses, and there was no problem with that kind of intermarrying because in fact all of them would wind up being cousins no matter what, right? They were all cousins.

Challenges and Controversies

[00:12:15] Elyse: But this was Viennese, this was Austria, this was the ultimate enemy of the French. And she was also struck immediately, and unfortunately for her, this became part of what made a great amount of resentment towards her, she was immediately struck and horrified by the rigidity of the protocol of the French.

So that from the minute she met Louis and she had this entourage that greeted her, everything that she did was codified, she was not allowed to have any freedom in her gestures of any kind. And this is of course what eventually turned her into the person who created her frivolous, as what they would call it farm, and her little theater, and her escape on the park of Versailles because she suffocated.

Aside from the fact that she assumed that she had the divine right to be who she was, she could not believe the rigidity of the rules and regulations. And immediately all of the women who were members of the ladies in waiting, the members of the court, they just looked their noses down at her because she was not up to their standards of behavior.

[00:13:26] Annie: Well, and she could have never gotten to that standard because she was a foreigner. So, you know, she, even if she tried, no matter how hard, she couldn’t win this one, she was going to be like…

[00:13:37] Elyse: She also, immediately, one she was, so they were maried, and of course she comes back, and she’s brought to the court in Versailles, which of course is now the seat of the power because Louis XV is still the king. And at this point he’s on his way out, it’s the last few years of his life in his reign, and he has his mistress, Madame du Barry, who is of course some local, a local girl from around here in Toulouse, and who has created an enormous court, and stylish designs and has made, and has become extremely, she was the influencer of the time. She was just amazing. And Marie-Antoinette refuses to talk to her because she was a basically a high class prostitute who became a mistress of the king. And because Marie-Antoinette is literally pure royal blood, she decides that she doesn’t have to deign to talk to her.

So, she makes an enemy of the king. And this lasts for almost the entire four years until Louis XV does die. She is convinced by certain women in the court who befriend her that she needs to tone it down. And so, one day, in the process of receiving all of the people in the court, she turns to Madame du Barry and she says to her, there are a lot of people here today, aren’t there? And this breaks this sort of ostracism, and this is the only time that it is known that she directly spoke to Madame du Barry. And then, of course, what happens is that, in 1774, when she is 18, and Louis is, what, 19, 20? He’s about two years older than her.

[00:15:16] Annie: Yeah, it was, they were close in age.

[00:15:18] Elyse: Louis XV dies, and lo and behold, her husband becomes Louis XVI, and she becomes Queen of France.

[00:15:26] Annie: Right.

They were both young, you know.

[00:15:29] Elyse: They were both very young, which was not unusual, in fact, in the history of the reigns of various kings and queens, but of course they were, neither of them prepared. Louis XVI, because that was not his personality to be king and had no interest, unfortunately, in being king and was extremely timid.

And one of the things that did happen, and this is when you talk about the correspondence, there was enormous amount of correspondence also between her mother and her priest, who was sent to kind of spy on her and see if he could encourage things, but there was no baby.

Motherhood and Personal Struggles

[00:16:06] Elyse: She wasn’t pregnant.

She wasn’t pregnant. She was married in 1770, by 1774, there was still no sign, and in fact, most people think that in fact, the marriage wasn’t even consummated in those years. That they were both so incredibly timid and inexperienced, and she was not about to take the, what’s the word we use? Take the, take a lead.

Yes. She was not about to take the lead.

[00:16:31] Annie: So, Antonia Fraser discusses this at length. It sounds like Louis XVI had some mechanical issues that he could have benefited fromcircumcision, but he hadn’t been. And so everything worked, but could be painful.

[00:16:52] Elyse: I see.

[00:16:53] Annie: So they didn’t…

They didn’t go all the way. Right.

[00:16:58] Elyse: Basically.

[00:16:59] Annie: The bit that makes the babies didn’t happen for a long time.

And they were both timid, as you mentioned, and also her mother kept on her case about this and sending her like, well, you’re supposed to beguile him. You’re supposed to do this. You’re supposed to do that. The kid didn’t want anything to do with her.

So what?

Anyway, it was difficult at first. It got resolved. They had several children later, but it was rough at the beginning.

[00:17:27] Elyse: The story is that somebody actually, I don’t remember who, I don’t, perhaps you remember, but…

[00:17:32] Annie: It was her brother.

[00:17:33] Elyse: It was her brother. Well her brother was, in fact, one of the things of course that makes it very dramatic is that when she left Vienna, that was the last time she saw anybody in her family except the one time that her brother Joseph came to the court in Versailles. And he was sent by their mother to see what was wrong and why she hadn’t already had any children.

[00:17:52] Annie: Right, so he came, and he had a man to man with his brother in law, and explained the birds and the bees, I think. And it’s crazy to us that they would be that unable to discuss these issues openly or seek therapy. Because I mean, they had doctors…

[00:18:13] Elyse: Yeah, but… you know, you’re a king of France, you don’t talk about these things, and he sounds like he was somebody extremely shy and reserved.

[00:18:21] Annie: And so showing his junk to his brother in law who was an emperor was fine, but not to doctors.

[00:18:26] Elyse: A nd I doubt very much if she would’ve, you know, she was raised and clearly this, it continues afterwards with a strangely, probably very romantic and very unrealistic idea of what this was all about.

I mean, she wasn’t really told the bottom line about what we have to do.

[00:18:42] Annie: Right. Yes, they needed some sex education and also some straight talk from people who didn’t have hang ups. That’s not what happened.

[00:18:51] Elyse: No, that’s not what happened. And clearly neither of them had an extremely strong sex drive, which most adolescents would have had.

[00:18:58] Annie: Yes, well, they probably did, but, you know, when you’re, they were repressed. Like, look, they were not, they were married in absentia.

[00:19:06] Elyse: Yeah.

[00:19:06] Annie: Because it would have been immoral for them to meet, you know, heaven forbid that something happens that very day before they are married.

[00:19:15] Elyse: Well, nothing happend even after they were married.

[00:19:17] Annie: But this is the mentality of people.

They were really like, at the same time, she needed to be a womb, but you also need to be a prude.

[00:19:27] Elyse: Right.

[00:19:27] Annie: What do you want?

[00:19:28] Elyse: Yes, and that, of course, is very different from the role of the mistresses, which, of course, Louis XVI, in fact, did not have, right?

Extravagance and Public Perception

[00:19:35] Elyse: So, but there’s another event that happens in 1774, which is before her first child, because she doesn’t have a child until 1778, eight years after the marriage. At a ball in Paris, she meets a Swedish nobleman, named Axel de Fersen. And this man, now there is endless, endless debate about whether they actually had a sexual relationship or just a very, very deep, very affectionate relationship as sort of friends, but more than friends. But this Swedish nobleman immediately basically was enthralled by her, and he was a faithful friend of theirs up until the very end, and he plays a crucial role at the very end in the last couple of years of their lives.

He stays in Versailles, he becomes a military man who sees action, he leaves, and he comes back four years later in 1778, which is in fact the year that she gives birth to her first child, Louis Charles.

[00:20:37] Annie: Right, so de Fersen is a complicated guy, but it’s very clear that he had lots of mistresses, he had other love interests. Was it a physical thing or not? My guess is no, but Antonia Fraser says probably yes, so we just don’t know. At the beginning, it is pretty clear that Louis XVI never thought that his children were not his.

He never said, you know, Oh, I have doubts about this child, or that child. So, I think there was no there there. I think they just, you know, she was a romance book reader. She wanted the romance aspect of things.Which she wasn’t getting with her husband.

[00:21:26] Elyse: He likes fixing clocks.

[00:21:27] Annie: Yes, he had other interests.

He was, he was a klutz, like, I don’t know.

[00:21:34] Elyse: Oh poor Louis XVI.

Anyway, so in 1777, I like this date because it, of course, comes back to things that we’ve talked about in other podcasts. She has her first official royal portrait painted by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, who is, of course, a woman who becomes one of her closest intimate friends and the royal portrait painter.

[00:21:55] Annie: Right, so another thing that I learned, and I don’t know if we mentioned in the episode we did about Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun, but before Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun painted her, she had an official Austrian painter.

[00:22:08] Elyse: Ah, I didn’t know that.

[00:22:10] Annie: A woman as well. And, then they said, no, you got to bring in a French woman. This is not going to work, and so they did bring in…

[00:22:19] Elyse: Elizabeth, who of course was a countess, so she was able to mix in Versailles society. I just want to correct myself because in fact the first child she had was not the son, the first child was Elizabeth.

She had a daughter first, who winds up being the only one who actually survives, this whole horrible story.

In 1780, her mother dies. And so we are talking 10 years after she has been sent to France and she, of course, during this time never ever saw her mother again, dealt with correspondence from her mother, through her brother Joseph, and through other intermediaries. But it sounds like she must have been extremely homesick for her family.

She was extremely close to many of her sisters, and it must have been extremely difficult for her to live in this very strange culture, be very isolated, and have very few people who had a certain compassion for the difference she had with the society that she was in, you know?

[00:23:17] Annie: Yeah, so she didn’t go back for the funeral. She didn’t do that.

She was, in a way, she was a prisoner in own new circumstances. She could not do things. I mean, she had obviously a very complicated relationship with her mother, but this was her mother.

[00:23:33] Elyse: But aparently, when she left they told her she is never coming back to Austria. This was not even an option in her life. Which I find strange, but for whatever reasons, she’s a gift, she’s an object given to the royal family of France. She’s an object, and that is the end of that, you know. I translated, for what it’s worth, something from a letterthat she wrote to her brother Joseph. Her mother dies in 1780, in 1781 she does have her first son, who is her second child, Louis Joseph, who unfortunately does die at the age of seven. There is a lot of tuberculosis, there’s a lot of child mortality, and he lives to be seven, but is in relatively poor health, and then does die.

[00:24:21] Annie: Yes, and he had spinal tuberculosis.

[00:24:24] Elyse: He had spinal tuberculosis.

[00:24:25] Annie: Which is very painful.

[00:24:26] Elyse: It’s awful.

[00:24:27] Annie: So, the child was not thriving, he contracted this condition very young and he just didn’t thrive.

[00:24:33] Elyse: He didn’t thrive. So we come to basically the year 1784. She has maintained a friendship with the Count Fersen, who comes and goes, and comes, and goes and manages to get himself opposed with French military so he can be close to Versailles and close to her and, yes, at the same time has lots of mistresses. And she has reached the point where finally, after 14 years, she finally, so how old is she in 1784?

14 years later, she’s 28. She starts to realize how much the people of France do not like her. And how much they don’t trust her. And of course, she has become spendthrift. She spends an enormous amount of money. She, I think it sounds to me that in a life of utter boredom for her, she decides that the only thing she can do is entertain herself.

And so she has a small group of very intimate friends. And she has parties, and she spends a fortune on clothing, and a fortune on hairdos, and a fortune on jewelry. The king, her husband, give her the Petit Trianon as a playhouse, literally.

And she has the workers of Versailles build her a farm where she brings in animals, and where she can go and take off the clothes that she has to wear in the court in Versailles, and wear simple clothing, and play at being something other than the Queen.

[00:26:05] Annie: Right. So she also did theater performances to entertain herself. And according to Antonia Fraser, she didn’t dress up as a farm girl, other than when she was on the stage.

So, maybe, I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But it’s really very clear that one of the things that happened to her that shocked her when she was very young, is that French women would wear a lot of rouge.

[00:26:28] Elyse: Yeah.

[00:26:29] Annie: And she hated it. She thought it looked really awful, but she had to do it. And so, once she emancipated herself a little bit and came more into her own, she decided that she was going to put away the rouge a little bit and do her own, get her own style.

And we have to also understand that at the time there people read pamphlets. So you had a lot of people who were connected to the court, gossips, things like that, and it was very entertaining to print out, not a whole book about her debauchery and all that, but pamphlets that would just they, yeah, make fun.

So they would base it on the visit of a certain gentleman to the court, or whatever, and they will make a whole story around it, saying that she was drunk and she had an orgy. And it is very obvious, she never drank any alcohol as far as we know in reality. And she never had orgies. But there were hundreds of pamphlets that were printed and, you know, today we say oh people believe the shit they read on Facebook but…

[00:27:39] Elyse: And fake information.

[00:27:40] Annie: Yes, but this was always the case. And stuff like that sells because that’s what people want to read, that’s what people want to hear. They want to get, you know they don’t like Austrians, so they want to hear that this Austrian queen is really a horrible, horrible, you know, baby eating monster. But she was not!

[00:27:58] Elyse: Right,

Ruining the economy. Basically, what happened was, and this carries on, of course, until the ultimate end, is that, as extravagant as she was, I read something yesterday where it says that even in her extravagance, except for one or two incidents, what she spent money on amounted to 7% and not more, of what was considered to be the budget. Because rumors were being spread that it was because of her spending that the country was starving, and was becoming so poor.

And of course, in the end, the reality is, yes, she was extravagant. And yes, she was a spendthrift, but it did not have anything to do with the politics of what was actually happening.

Louis XVI and his Support for the American Revolution

[00:28:37] Annie: What was happening is that Louis XVI decided to help America against England, and a large chunk of money from the French king went to support the American Revolution. We need to do an episode about this because it was, that’s what ruined the country. That was the start of it. It wasn’t Marie-Antoinette that was spending all the money.

It’s Louis XVI, you know, these were the days of the Enlightenment. Even kings and noblemen wanted a more fair society. And the fact that they could see that the Americans were possibly going to pull this off was very enthralling. And they really supported them to no end. And also it was against the English. So that was good! (laugh)

[00:29:24] Elyse: Yeah, I suspect that, I personally think more likely that it was really because it was against the English, because I do not think that in spite of other things, they were, if otherwise, they would be going towards their ruin in the sense of eliminating all monarchy.

But what was interesting was that for the several decades before the French Revolution, there was a lot of political fomentation. There was a lot of movement to create a constitutional monarchy. And this was, of course, modeled after the English, in spite of them being the enemy. And there was this push by the people to create this. And so there was a lot of turmoil. There was a lot of political issues. There were some famines, there were some problems with crops. There were lots of things. It was extremely complex. And the movement towards a constitutional monarchy was very, very, very strong. And that included many of the nobility.

And, it sounds to me almost that Louis XVI was simply ill advised because in the end, of course, he’s wishy washy, and this is, of course, what happens.

[00:30:27] Annie: He was very indecisive in politics.

[00:30:29] Elyse: He was very indecisive. She wrote a letter to her brother Joseph, and this is a quote that I have sort of translated from the French, so I’m hoping that this is as accurate as it can be.

Because she has found, people are telling her about all these pamphlets, about all these things. They hate her. The population in general, and a lot of the court, really reach a point where, it’s a strong word, they actually do hate her. And so she writes, I am not duped to what people give me credit for, because a lot of people are saying it’s her fault, whatever is happening, it’s her fault, that she has more political influence over the king than anybody else, which of course was absolutely not true.

She says, I am well aware, especially in politics, that I have no influence on the King. What would be the point of having conflicts with the ministers about things for which the King would not support me, without lying or showing off? I let the people, the people, I think in this case being the court, which of course filters down to the rest of the population.

I let the people believe that I have more influence than I have. That gives me at least a little influence. I thought that was very interesting.

[00:31:39] Annie: It’s very meta, huh? She makes them believe that, that she has a lot of influence when she doesn’t.

[00:31:46] Elyse: She doesn’t. She doesn’t really.

The Diamond Necklace Affair

[00:31:48] Elyse: She does know, though, that she has to tone down her expenses. And she has a couple of friends who convince her that it’s time for her to simply not spend as much money on her clothes, on her hairdos, on her jewelry. And she does make an effort, and I think it’s relative to the amount of money she was actually spending, but unfortunately, the next year, we have the terrible affair of the diamond necklace.

[00:32:16] Annie: Right. So, to set this up a little bit, the queen, always queens, and the king to, they put a lot of money into the hands of the people around them simply by putting orders, you know, ‘passer commande’. They would say, Oh, I would like a coat, and they would like to order this coat from this one person that they had heard was good and also needed the business.

Things like that. And they would just be very generous with their money. They would say, look, I can be nice to you by buying, I don’t know, a nice carriage from you, or things like that.

And this was how it was done.

[00:32:54] Elyse: Patronage.

[00:32:54] Annie: Yes. That’s the word. I’m going to patronage your business.

And it was a, you always had people who wanted to be in front of the king or queen so they could sell them their services. And very often it was people who were very good at what they did, you know, but it cost a lot of money.

[00:33:13] Elyse: She becomes the victim of what is the biggest scam.

Yeah, it was a scam.

It was a scam, the biggest scam, the biggest scandal of the end of the 1700s.

There is a, now I’m suddenly bleeping out, was he a cardinal? What was he?

[00:33:30] Annie: There was a jeweler who…

[00:33:32] Elyse: But the minister who was, he was a clergyman, I believe.

So there’s this Cardinal who is acting as intermediary for these jewelers. Who have this absolutely exquisite, I saw a picture of it first of all, okay, it’s probably worth millions, and millions, and millions, but it is such, so over the top.

[00:33:52] Annie: It’s decadent, yeah.

[00:33:53] Elyse: It’s decadent, this enormous, enormous diamond necklace. And these jewelers, who are reputable jewelers in Paris, want to sell this diamond necklace to the Queen.

[00:34:06] Annie: Right, and they had tried to sell it at other courts and were turned away. And then they decide, okay, we’re going to try this with Marie-Antoinette. See if we can make it work.

[00:34:14] Elyse: See if we can make it work. And it is a real, true diamond necklace that is really worth a fortune, an absolute, unbelievable fortune.

The Forged Letters

[00:34:22] Elyse: And so you have this intermediary, this

[00:34:26] Annie: Cardinal.

[00:34:28] Elyse: who is approached by a woman who calls herself Madame de la Motte, and who, says that she represents these jewelers, and he winds up being the victim as an intermediary in this scam to try and buy this necklace and sell it to Marie-Antoinette.

[00:34:52] Annie: Right. So, I think the biggest problem with this, is that she had decided she didn’t want any more jewelry. And so when she got the letter from the jeweler and he was sending it from England, she just burned it.

She was like, I’m not interested.

[00:35:09] Elyse: And the necklace cost 1.6 million gold coins at the time.

[00:35:15] Annie: Yeah, it was ridiculous. And so she burns the letter, and he tries to write to her again, says that he has gotten an order from her, like that she ordered it. She told him she wanted this, but she never did. And then he says, I got a letter from her. Of course it was a forged letter. And we know it was forged because it was signed Marie-Antoinette de France.

She never signed her letters, hardly, and when she did, she signed them Marie-Antoinette, not Marie-Antoinette de France. The higher you are in the pecking order at the court, the less name you use. So if you are Madame or Monsieur, you’re the cat’s meow, okay? And they did not go spreading their titles.

No, no, no, no. Base people spread their titles. Okay?

The Scandal Unfolds

[00:36:07] Annie: So we know all the fake, there were a lot of fake letters going around that she had ordered this and then she wasn’t, and that the jeweler had borrowed money and that he was now going to be bankrupt, and this awful Austrian woman would not pay up what he was owed, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was all BS. She never wanted this.

[00:36:28] Elyse: No, but she becomes officially, legally accused of abuse of power and recklessness. And it becomes a huge, huge scandal.

And even though she is exonerated, and they can actually prove that she has nothing to do with it, and this Madame de la Motte turns out to have been simply a high class prostitute who was imitating a member of the aristocracy to sell this scam, it adds to the hatred that the people have because they do not trust her. And they do not believe that this ‘foreigner’, she’s called Madame Deficit.

[00:37:06] Annie: Yeah.

[00:37:06] Elyse: Or ‘The Austrian’.

[00:37:08] Annie: Right. And she wanted to bring Necker back. It was…

[00:37:11] Elyse: Was a nice, unnoble Protestant.

[00:37:14] Annie: Right.

But she didn’t like him, but she thought it would be better to handle the affairs of the kingdom than whatever the name of the guy was, who was in at the time. Anyway, it was complicated. It was all, you know, scandal cells. And it was selling a lot of pamphlets and everybody was very happy about this. Like, Ooh, yay. A good story.

[00:37:34] Elyse: Yes, not only a good story, but I think that If you can imagine that we’re already in the 1780s, this is 1785, this is not that far before the actual revolution.

There is enough unrest, there is enough dissatisfaction, there is enough resentment towards the monarchy, that she suddenly becomes the ultimate target, and she is considered to be the reason why everything is going bad, when ultimately that has nothing to do with everything.

Very little. Very little. Yeah. It’s really terrible. I mean, she was naive, she was a spendthrift, she was obviously someone who believed in the divine right of the monarchy. She was living in a bubble, but she was certainly not the cause of the misery of most of the people in the country.

[00:38:22] Annie: Yes, and this whole diamond necklace thing, it just damaged her reputation further. It was terrible to begin with, and it got worse.

(Mid-roll ad spot)

Marie-Antoinette’s Family Life

[00:38:31] Elyse: In ’85, she gave birth to her third child, Louis Charles.

And then in 86, to her last of the last of her four children, a little girl named Sophie, who unfortunately died at the age of 11 months.

[00:38:45] Annie: She did not have very vigorous children, I think all of her children were a little bit…

[00:38:51] Elyse: Well, Elizabeth, who’s the only one who survived, she was the first one, ironically, first born and she was one that actually lived the longest.

[00:39:01] Annie: And you know, she… she was a mother, she had natural feelings for her children, like I know anybody who’s given birth to a child, or even adopted a child, the kind of love you feel for that child when you first meet them is incredible. It’s a rush. You can never forget that, and she had that for her children.

But she knew that her sons were not her own, but her daughters were. And she was good to her children.

She was not, she was better to her children than her mother was to her. She tried the best she could.

[00:39:36] Elyse: She tried the best she could.

There’s a wonderful painting, I’m sorry, but I suddenly don’t remember the name of the artist. But there’s this wonderful portrait that she had done of her with her children, including the empty cradle for Sophie.

[00:39:50] Annie: Right, where she has the dauphin pointing, his hand points to where the berceau, should have been, the little cradle should have been.

Yeah, she had tender feelings for her children, and she was accused of being a monster to her children, to having raped her own sons.

[00:40:08] Elyse: She was basically accused of almost everything horrible except for absolute murder, I’d say… you know.

[00:40:14] Annie: They didn’t say she killed anyone, but short of killing, she was accused of everything.

[00:40:19] Elyse: Just about everything.

The Flight to Varennes

[00:40:20] Elyse: So, the last birth is ’86, and then we come up to the fatal time of 1789. And with all of the discontent and the efforts to convince the king to create a constitutional monarchy, have him sign papers saying that there is a constitution, a convention is called, and it’s called the Convention of the National Assembly.

It’s very hard to kind of translate some of these terms because of the difference in the structure, but this is, they have what they call a Trois Etats, and I have a very hard time trying to explain this in English because you have the nobility, the clergy, and what is called the Third Estate, which basically means everyonethat has a certain level of standing in society that is not yet noble or clergy, but this does not include the very poor, at all.

[00:41:09] Annie: No, no, it’s the bourgeois, people like that.

[00:41:12] Elyse: And so, there is an enormous push with certain people who are moderates, to convince Louis XVI to sign this constitution that they have written up. And because he is very ill advised, and because he is so, in fact, wishy washy, he decides to not sign the constitution. He is, unfortunately for him, it would have made a big difference, forever and ever, if indeed he had.

And they are put under, more or less, house… it’s not really house arrest, but they are basically told that they are to stay at the palace at the Tuileries, and stay there and not go anywhere else.

Yeah, prisoners.

Right. And then, because he does have a group that are loyal to him and are royalists, and this does include the Count Fersen, who has been in touch with the Austrians, among other people.

They have a group of people, including Fersen, who decide to help them try to flee. And on the 21st of June of 1789, the immediate family gets into a carriage, and they flee in the middle of the night heading towards the Eastern frontier, hoping to make it across the border into the Austrian empire.

And they are unfortunately recognized. And they are caught at a small place called Varennes. There are lots of movies that you can see that talk about this event. I’ve seen three or four in that have been made at different points in the history of French film and television.

It’s rather strange, it’s incredibly tragic. It illuminates the total incomprehension of this man, Louis XVI of what was really happening around him, and just how ill advised they had been, because if they had not fled, they would never have been executed. What happened was that the Convention was convinced that not only were they fleeing, but they were fleeing to bring the Austrian army across the border to fight against the Revolution.

[00:43:19] Annie: Right, they were going east, she was very careful, she could never set foot into Austria. She was trying to get them to go towards Switzerland instead of Austria. Anyway, it was a mess.

It was a terrible mess. And the King, because they had a problem with a wheel, they were delayed.

The King decided, oh, I’m going to go, he was in disguise. He was going to go talk to some farmer who was working his fields.

The guy recognized that this was not who he said he was, and alerted, and they got caught.

[00:43:55] Elyse: They got caught. They got caught. Stupid, stupid…

[00:43:58] Annie: But you know, I’m not sure if this hadn’t happened, if they would have saved them. I mean, the people of France were very, very angry.

[00:44:07] Elyse: Yes.

[00:44:08] Annie: And they needed some blood. And they got the blood, and even very reasonable people, people who wrote some very good reasoned arguments, they still condemned the king to die, and they still condemned her to die.

I think it was, there was a thirst for blood in the population.

[00:44:27] Elyse: Well, well, clearly, the people, those that were considered to be the moderates, were also eventually assassinated themselves, you see.

So I think what happens is that you have, which unfortunately is repeated again, in fact, in the Bolshevik revolution, a hundred something years later, they might have been able to create a constitutional monarchy if at the very beginning that had gone very well and very smoothly.

The Imprisonment

[00:44:53] Elyse: The more extreme factions became more and more important, and once they fled and were recaptured, they were put into the Temple Tower. This was no longer house arrest in a beautiful castle, château. This was now real prison. And this was the moment when they voted to eliminate the king.

At first, I think from what I read, they would not have eliminated Marie-Antoinette. This is not what happened. It was little by little that this hatred boiled over, so of course…

[00:45:24] Annie: Killing the King wasn’t enough.

[00:45:26] Elyse: It wasn’t enough, it really wasn’t enough.

[00:45:28] Annie: It didn’t satisfy everybody and so they had to keep going until they killed her, and most of their kids too.

[00:45:35] Elyse: Well, she was separated from the two children, basically who left. And her son unfortunately, who was kept in prison, but with somebody who was kept with him. He died of what they think was tuberculosis, also.

[00:45:48] Annie: Yes, he also had the same problem as his brother.

[00:45:52] Elyse: And the daughter was the only one, who in fact was not killed. And so, on the 21st of January of 1793, Louis XVI was beheaded, on what is now the Place de la Concorde.

[00:46:08] Annie: Right, so it was Place Royale back then, and this is where they killed the king, and it was painful, and so later they renamed it Place de la Concorde, which means of the peace, agreement between us, une concorde is when you, is when you agree to things that are uncomfortable.

[00:46:30] Elyse: Now, at this time, Marie-Antoinette is separated, of course, from her children, and she is in prison, but they have not yet decided whether they think they have to kill her or not.

There is a faction that believes that having killed the king is sufficient, that they really do not have to get rid of her because she is not the person who was in power, but the group that is part of what is called, forever and ever now, The Terreur, they say, no, we have to eliminate the royal family.

[00:47:00] Annie: So this is, this is something that is really terrifying. French people at the time believed both that women were inferior and dangerous.

[00:47:11] Elyse: Yes.

[00:47:12] Annie: And this idea came from Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was a philosopher. It came from him, so did Let Them Eat Cake. He had a princess say this in a novel that he wrote 50 years before Marie-Antoinette ever is said to have said that. So anyway, this idea that women were both inferior and terrifying and conniving.

[00:47:35] Elyse: Very misogynist.

[00:47:36] Annie: It’s the extreme of misogyny. Which is it? Are they inferior, or are they conniving and will take over the world?

[00:47:44] Elyse: That makes them evil, period.

[00:47:46] Annie: Yes. So, this was the prevailing sentiment of the French Revolution. This was the culture that they were working in.

And they really were, they really loathed women who had anything important to say. Despite the fact that they had some very, very smart women, who said some very, very, smart things,

including Olympe de Gouges, who was an outstanding person, and we did an episode about her. So, you know, there were a lot of, they had a lot of evidence that women were neither inferior or evil, but they chose not to look, not to see that.

[00:48:21] Elyse: No, they really did. And I found it fascinating that people like Robespierre, who was originally one of the people who absolutely wanted to make sure of the execution of the king, he himself, of course, winds up being executed.

The Trial of Marie-Antoinette

[00:48:33] Elyse: There’s this extreme, extreme blood, the bloodlust that happens at this moment. And so they decide after months because Louis the XVI is killed in January, she has been kept in prison, isolated and not able to see either of her children, and in October, they bring her, they drag her, actually, into the court, and they accuse her of incredibly vile things.

[00:48:59] Annie: Yes.

[00:49:00] Elyse: And they decide immediately that she is guilty, and she is convicted of high treason.

[00:49:07] Annie: Right. And to convict her, they did bring in, I mean, they had a sham court. They would bring in people who had vague knowledge of what might have happened at the court, were never there themselves, but heard all of these things. And they were evil things going on at court, you know, don’t you know?

[00:49:23] Elyse: There were. And pathetically, and tragically, her end was so much more debasing than even the end of her husband.

The Execution

[00:49:33] Elyse: She was not even allowed the dignity of a regular carriage.

She was put on the back of a simple, horrible little wagon, was booed and spit at all the way up to the Place de la Concorde, where she was, in fact, executed. And it’s interesting that witnesses talk about her dignity at the end.

[00:49:54] Annie: Yes. But that’s all that was left. She was, and even that she was accused of being haughty because she did not cry or carry on.

But you know what? She was raised to be a dignified person, she was raised to be a queen and she was to the end. And typically, when she would, when her carriage would pass, very often the king, the queen and their children were in separate carriages for formal occasions.

And typically when the king passed, they would cheer and applaud, but when she passed, everything went quiet. And then for the children, they cheered and applauded as well. Okay? When she died, they were not quiet. They were booing her and hissing, and being, and carrying on. I blame the people.

I think people had like weird, pathetic, hatred in their heart and couldn’t even recognize it. They didn’t see how they’re… and I know the circumstances were difficult for the farmers and that for regular people, these were difficult years. The country did not have the money to sustain its desire for influence abroad or to even sustain a modicum of, you know, wellness for the people. But you don’t have to be that wicked, you know?

[00:51:14] Elyse: Well, or that bloodthirsty, really, that bloodthirsty. It is true. I find that, as you said at the very beginning, the end is not only sad, but it is a ultimately, in a sense, really tragic. I was writing down my notes and I went downstairs and I said to my husband, who of course is French and has studied history much more than I have, I said, do you know what they did to her at the end?

It just got to me even reading about it.

The Aftermath

[00:51:37] Elyse: So she was beheaded, they took her body, they placed her head in between her legs, and in the ultimate sort of desecration of a human being, and she was put into an unmarked grave in a cemetery, eventually next to her husband in what is now the 8th arrondissement of Paris.

And it was Louis XVIII, who was the last surviving brother, of Louis XVI, who became the final king, if you wish, of France, dug up what was left of their remains and actually made a memorial that still exists on the spot, which I have actually never been to or seen.

[00:52:18] Annie: I haven’t either.

[00:52:19] Elyse: But there is actually a memorial there in their honor.

And apparently, most people don’t talk about it because, if you go there, there’s an indication that you are a royalist, which I find absolutely ridiculous.

[00:52:32] Annie: Yeah. I’m going to look it up.

[00:52:33] Elyse: Yeah, it looks like a miniature, like a memorial that would be on the esplanade of the Washington DC, you know, one of the small temples, kinds of things. Eventually, of course, what was left of them was brought to Saint Denis, but there was not very much left of them.

[00:52:47] Annie: And also they have, since done a lot of DNA testing, and she never, I mean, there are no King of France today, even if people say they are the King of France and the maternity and paternity of their children has been confirmed.

[00:53:03] Elyse: Her last child, Elisabeth, her last surviving child, who was indeed her first child, her daughter, for whatever reasons, they chose not to execute her.

They basically decided that she had nothing to do with any of this. She left, she was exiled first to Austria, and then she went to live in England. She married, she never had children, so their direct line just basically died off.

But she did live until she was in her late 50s. And it’s sort of strange that this was the route she took.

She went from France to Austria, and then eventually to England. And that is, in fact, where she died. And it was ultimately her uncle who became, well, first the two uncles, of course, became the two last kings of France.

Legacy and Reflection

[00:53:50] Annie: So, if you would like to, you know, remember Marie-Antoinette, a good place to do that, of course, is the Conciergerie in Paris, where they have a chapelle.She has had an immense influence on style and she loved furniture, she loved beautiful things. So I guess we can remember her that way.

And really, she did the best she could all her whole life. So, you know, it just angers me in a way that she was treated that way because she was a victim of her own circumstances.

[00:54:23] Elyse: Well, she was, to me, the ultimate case of the object woman that was part of the whole mentality of royalty.

She had nothing to say about her destiny one way or the other. She had nothing to say about who she would live with, where she would live, what she would do. Yes, she was an extravagant person. I’m sure she was a spoiled brat in a lot of ways. But she was brought up to be exactly that.

And she did not do anything other than be who she was supposed to be until the very end of her life.

[00:54:53] Annie: Thank you very much, Elyse, that was sobering, but very interesting. So thank you very much.

[00:54:58] Elyse: You are quite welcome, Annie.

[00:55:00] Annie: Au revoir.

[00:55:01] Elyse: Au revoir.

Thank you, Patrons!

[00:55:08] Annie: Again, I want to thank my patrons for giving back and supporting the show. Patreon supporters get new episodes as soon as they are ready and ad-free. If that sounds good to you, be like them, follow the link in the show notes. Patrons get more exclusive rewards for doing that, you can see all of that at patreon.com/joinus.

And a special shout out this week to our Join Us in France champions: Howard Hack, Suzanne, Bobby Heath, and Janice Fox. And to all of my current patrons, it is wonderful to have you on board in the community of travel enthusiasts and Francophiles who keep this podcast going.

And to support Elyse, go to patreon.com/ElysArt.

This week, I’ve published a bonus episode about the reopening of Notre Dame, and I’ll be sharing some links for Zoom meetings very soon as well.

Review on VoiceMap

[00:56:13] Annie: Somebody left this review of my VoiceMap tour this week. It was about Le Marais. ‘ We really enjoyed this VoiceMap tour. It was so easy to use, nicely paced, informative, and all with the delightful and warm voice of Annie Sargent. Perfect way to explore the Marais, highly recommended’. Well, thank you, whoever you are. You probably listened to the podcast, so I hope you hear this.

My voice is not so sweet today, it’s winter. Thank you very much for reviews and remember, podcast listeners get a big discount for buying these tours from my website. But if you buy directly from me, it’s a manual process. So, do that a few days before your trip, and I will send you the codes. And if you want to see more reviews for these tours, go to joinusinfrance.com/VMR, which stands for VoiceMap Reviews.

If you’re thinking about a trip to France next year and you have a hard time deciding on what you should do, what you should leave out, I can help you with my one on one consultations on Zoom. I offer two levels of itinerary consultation, the Bonjour service where we chat for an hour and you get to ask me all your questions and I give you some suggestions, and also the VIP level where you get a lot more details and a written plan a few days after our call.

And you can see all the details and book at joinusinfrance.com/boutique.

Shop on Amazon

[00:57:43] Annie: And also remember that I am an Amazon affiliate, so if you’d like to support the podcast while shopping for Christmas, isn’t that what we’re all doing these days? Type joinusinfrance.com/Amazon into your web browser.

It’ll take you to a special search page of Amazon. You’ll see some of my favorite travel products, but if you don’t need any of those products, just use the search bar at the top, like you always do on Amazon and every purchase you make through this link makes me eligible for a small commission. And get this, it does not cost you a penny more. We all pay the Amazon advertising commission every time we shop there, so this is your chance to assign that commission to me instead of having it go back into Amazon’s very deep pockets. Sometimes it’s enough to pay for the streaming costs associated with a podcast, which is very nice. And thank you for your support.

Tickets for Notre Dame de Paris

[00:58:42] Annie: Here’s some advice for getting tickets to visit Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral. These were shared by Patricia Perry, who’s a good friend of mine and she’s been on the podcast a few times and she lives in Paris full time. She’s been trying to get tickets unsuccessfully so far, she says, but this is what she’s learned.

Time slots for bookings are released at midnight, Paris time, covering dates up to two days in advance. To improve your chances, I recommend joining the virtual waiting room about 30 minutes before midnight to be ready when the system opens. If you’re trying to book dates beyond two days out, they’ll appear greyed out or sold out automatically.

That’s just how the system works for now, and that happens a lot in France. If it’s greyed out, if it looks like everything’s sold out, it might be that they haven’t opened them yet.

From December 9th to December 15th, there’s an added challenge. Fewer places available to the general public and shorter operating hours.

It’s going to be especially tough to grab a spot during that period.Keep in mind that time slot availability is adjusted in real time based on how many people are currently inside the cathedral versus its capacity. So slots may pop up or disappear, as the system updates.

The app for Notre Dame bookings is not perfect but it’s finally here. If you still haven’t downloaded it, search for Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris in French, the icon is dark blue with a big ND on it for Notre Dame. Given the high demand and the likelihood of bots, yes, bots snapping up these tickets, I wouldn’t be surprised if new slots released at midnight are gone within minutes.

So good luck to you, it’s definitely a challenge. It’ll get easier as the hype goes down a little bit as it’s sure to do.

My thanks to podcast editors, Anne and Cristian Cotovan, who produced the transcripts and make this podcast sound good.

Next Week on the Podcast

[01:01:01] Annie: Next week on the podcast, it’ll be the episode just before Christmas, and we’ve had a lot of episodes about Christmas in France, so I didn’t want to do that again. It’ll be an episode about a young man who’s doing something extraordinary to raise money for a very good cause. You’ll have to tune in to find out more.

Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you join me next time so we can look around France together!

Au revoir!

Copyright

[01:01:28] Annie Sargent: The Join Us in France travel podcast is written, hosted, and produced by Annie Sargent and Copyright 2024 by AddictedToFrance. It is released under a Creative Commons, attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives license.

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Transcript for Episode 524: Marie-Antoinette: The Queen of Controversy