The Queen's Necklace (31 page)

Popular opinion demeaned and besmirched her gaiety of spirit, her love of a beautiful and freer-flowing life, her desire for friendship, and the innocent flirtatiousness by which she sought to please everyone: in short,
les plus belles vertus de sa jeunesse
—the loveliest qualities of her youth—as the brothers Goncourt put it. But even if the Queen were not a Vestal Virgin, did that really deserve such moral outrage from the not-so-puritanical French? “It was a strange kind of censoriousness,” the brothers exclaim, and they are right to do so, “that even in the so-called century of women the Queen was to be forgiven nothing that expressed real femininity.” French historians of this most frivolous of periods seem to tolerate everyone else’s peccadilloes as something to be expected, and find them perfectly natural—so why not those of their queens?

The answer to this question becomes clear when we confront the third of these accusations. The French did not dislike Marie-Antoinette because she was immoral. On the contrary, they found her immoral, and piled the decaying products of their basest fantasies on her,
because
they did not like her … And the chief reason why they disliked her, it seems to us, can only have been that she wasn’t French.

The Queen, it cannot be denied, was bound by a thousand ties, emotional and political, to the house of her birth and the powerful family from which she had come. Sanguine by nature, it never occurred to her for a moment that the interests
of the two allies, Austria and France, might not always exactly coincide. Public opinion, which had never felt much enthusiasm for the Austrians (the French had always passionately hated any alliance with them) exaggerated her links with that country, spoke of the millions of livres she sent back to her brother, and took great delight in passing on stories by word of mouth, such as the following:

When Joseph II of Austria ordered the closure of the Schelde corridor, Marie-Antoinette defended him with all her might before the French Court, and told the Foreign Minister Vergennes:

“All you ever think about the Emperor is that he is my brother.”

To which he replied:

“I do always bear it in mind. But before all else I have to consider that Monsieur the Dauphin is your son.”

France was a closed society, in which outsiders had no place. There has never been a European country in which foreigners were shown less sympathy. A foreign-born queen, tainted with foreign interests, could never be popular, and when the hostility towards her reached its peak, the very worst term of abuse they could find for her was
L’Autrichienne
: ‘that Austrian woman’.

This fact can perhaps only be fully understood, and felt on the skin, by people from outside the country. If someone in Hungary remarks that “You’re not Hungarian”, it is of course not exactly flattery, but nor is it necessarily an insult. It could be a simple statement of fact. If an Englishman happens not to be pure English, and has Scots or Welsh blood in his veins, he will be openly proud of it. But if someone in France tells you, “You are not French!” it denotes something lacking, some fundamental moral deficiency. You probably go around at night with a false beard stealing small change from the caps of blind beggars, are furthermore physically deformed, and carry Lord knows what weapons concealed beneath your garments; in short, you are a subhuman creature, though rather less likeable than an animal.

As can be imagined, this powerful French xenophobia may well have been the basis of Marie-Antoinette’s unpopularity.

However, as we have said, Marie-Antoinette was neither a demon, as the Revolution painted her, nor the angel portrayed by the counter-revolution. Perhaps Stefan Zweig is right: the real problem was that she was simply mediocre. Her final martyrdom is very touching, but there really is nothing in her life to make us think of her with particular veneration or emotion. As we take our leave of her, we should quote, in their original beauty, the words of Lamartine, in which he characterises her as follows:

C
OMING TO THE END OF OUR STORY
and reading through what we have written, we are somewhat alarmed to find that however much we have tried to paint a full and many-sided picture of the age, we have still not really succeeded in placing sufficient emphasis on what Talleyrand called ‘the sweetness of life’. The reader might well be left with the impression that the final hours of the Ancien Régime were careworn and oppressive, a ‘moral wasteland’, a time of drought before the storm, and he would perhaps be glad not to have lived then. Which would be quite wrong. To have been alive then must have been to experience one of the most delightful of European centuries.

Huizinga notes in another connection that ‘chronicles’, that is, works of history written as literature, almost always paint a rather dark picture of our period, because they find its grievances so vivid. Anyone who wants to learn about the brightness, beauty and happiness of a particular age has to turn to the record left by artists. And if we follow the great Dutchman’s advice and compare the painters of various centuries from the ‘eudaemonic’ point of view, would we find any other age whose canvases reflect the sweetness of life with the same intensity as that marvellous line of artists from Watteau to Fragonard?

The painters of eighteenth-century France are not much in fashion nowadays—indeed it is almost in bad taste to mention Boucher, the great master of the mid-century, in the presence of those in the know. And this is perfectly natural. They marked the end of one great period, and after them something quite different began. Far be it from us to argue with those who are
better qualified, but all the same we cannot help feeling that the time will come when these painters will once again be of interest. Our concern is not with their relative greatness, but with that sense of the sweetness of life reflected in their pictures.

Watteau and Fragonard … according to the Goncourts they are the only poets of the eighteenth century. The verse writers suffer from the dry rationalism of the period, while these two great artists proclaim what in other ages is the subject matter of poets: the world of dream, fable, intoxication and nostalgia.

Watteau lived at the very start of the century. The great representative of our own period is Fragonard, the delegate from the flower fields of Grasse in perennially happy Provence. With a kind of dreamlike intensity, his works conjure up in our souls the eternal myth of the great woodlands: mighty trees, tiny human and animal figures; the trees bent in sorrow, the men and women depicted beneath them existing in a kind of superhuman joy that almost succeeds in making their baby faces seem serious—a joy that, like music, is almost painful. What makes the paintings of Watteau and Fragonard so special is that they seem to depict scenes from an old novel—very beautiful, subtly erotic, and tinged with melancholy—scenes from some wonderful mythological story such as Psyche and Eros. The viewer is seized by a rich, complex yearning, an intense longing to know their secret, their unspoken mystery, a desire to return to the woodland world that is sweeter than anything in this life, and, finally, the desire for something—one knows not what—that great and inexpressible nostalgia which truly creative art awakens in the soul.

And then it begins to dawn on one: this age was as beautiful as the most finely-worked lace, as a piece of Sèvres porcelain with its timeless charm and fragile delicacy; as the noble oozings of the Tokai grape, full and rich with sweetness; as the autumn air in Hungary, when the reddening leaves are scented with the inexpressible sweetness of death.

Only poetry can express this—nothing else. Verlaine’s lines, from the
Fêtes galantes
.

The necklace trial took place in 1786. Three years later the Revolution broke out.

The revolution was of course ‘carried out’ spontaneously by the people, as an uprising, a devastating volcanic eruption—or more precisely it was the work of the street people of Paris, the
dark mob from the St Antoine quarter, the workers who in consequence of a blundering Anglo-French trade agreement were made temporarily unemployed, and who, because of the equally blundering politics of superstition, could not for the time being buy bread; and this was followed on a wider scale by the whole nation, as a people oppressed by local village taxes and emboldened by the example of Paris took revenge for the way they had been ground down over the centuries.

But it would be pushing at an open door to argue that the populace did not rush off into revolution all by itself, but went there because they were led into it; that they were merely an instrument wielded by their superiors; or that, like Victor Hugo’s famous loose cannon, the uprising went on to destroy the very people who set it off. The revolutionaries, as everyone knows, called one another
citoyens
—citizens—and the essence of and influence behind the revolution was neither popular nor proletarian but bourgeois. It was the middle-class-dominated Third Estate that put an end to the power of the privileged.

The causes of the Revolution are no longer in question. It was not so much that the populace were destitute as that the bourgeoisie were increasingly prosperous. The peasantry certainly had their sufferings, but that had been the case for centuries, and by Louis XVI’s time people were at last beginning to think that it might be necessary to assist them. Moreover, the situation of the agrarian workers was not uniformly bleak. The notorious abuses of the landowners were not everywhere equally oppressive. Wahl draws attention to the fact that around this time the peasantry were turning woods on the great estates over to arable land without asking permission of the squirearchy and without resistance from them. The institution of serfdom, which the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe had suffered for so long, was by now confined to the easternmost provinces. Louis XVI had freed his own serfs, and his example had been spontaneously
followed by many aristocrats. The remainder were given their freedom wherever there was enough money in the Treasury to compensate landowners.

And in fact, where things were at their worst, the people did not revolt. It was Tocqueville who noted that the most mutinous estates, for example the relatively affluent Île de France, were those that had suffered least from the old institutions, while those that had endured the most—in Brittany and the Loire estuary—became the powder keg of the counter-revolution.

The nobility were of course rich, at least in theory, since aristocratic privileges had never been as strong as they became immediately before they were terminated. But in practice this group was also struggling, since the obligation to maintain a style of living was proving ever more expensive, and many great families were going bankrupt.

On the other hand the bourgeoisie, in reality if not in theory, were doing rather better. They had been fostered and enriched by the great economic upswing we discussed at the beginning of this book, and they grew wealthy on the luxurious habits of the aristocracy, not just of France but also beyond its borders.

We are not primarily thinking here of the petit bourgeois craftsmen and shopkeepers. In Louis XVI’s reign, such families would all come together to eat in the kitchen in winter because they could not imagine the luxury of lighting fires in two rooms in the house at the same time. And for people at this level there was one traditional attitude that had not yet been eroded by the Enlightenment—Louis XVI was not alone in his religiosity. It was from a section of the bourgeoisie, in fact if not officially the leading sector, from the
noblesse de robe
, the lawyers, and the financially and intellectually pre-eminent, that the revolutionary discontent originated.

For a hundred years the higher bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia had felt aggrieved by the fact that while the real power lay in their hands, all the grandeur and distinction that should accompany it remained with the nobility. And the
arrogance of the nobility increased as their real power declined. In the second half of the century they attempted to seize power again: not only were the most senior positions in both the army and the law restricted to members of noble families, but they sought on the basis of obsolete documents to enforce their former landowning rights over a peasantry that had long been liberated. The attempt failed miserably: the expropriation of the army and the law took place on paper only, simply because the leading bourgeois families had long before bought their way into the nobility. But that futile attempt, together with the steady ennoblement of the bourgeoisie, simply deepened the rift between the old privileged class and the new leaders of society. The intellectuals and the wealthy, says Rivarol—that grandfather of all right-wing ideologists since—found the arrogance of the aristocracy insupportable, and for that reason many of them purchased rank for themselves; but this simply produced a new form of misery. They had been ennobled, but they were not nobility. “The King’s subjects were cured of their bourgeois condition as from scrofula—it left its mark.”

The indignity of finding themselves not quite noble was felt most strongly by those leading intellectuals who were invited into the salons of those aristocrats who so much enjoyed their wit. They stayed as guests in country manors and were showered with all sorts of gifts and distinctions, and yet—in most cases no doubt unintentionally—they were still not accepted as equals. Of all forms of pride, that of the writer is the greatest and the most aggressive, and this pride was constantly being trampled on by the privileged, by their very acts of kindness and goodwill. The best examples of this are Beaumarchais and Chamfort.

“Your Excellency,” Chamfort said to someone. “I know very well what I ought to know, but I also know that it is much easier for you to patronise me than to treat me as an equal.”

There could be no better expression of a writer’s prickly self-regard. There is an echo of this in our period in what happened to a certain Abbé Rousseau. He, like Abélard before him, fell in
love with one of his aristocratic pupils, and “finding no way to resolve the conflict of feelings between nobility and low birth”, as he wrote in his farewell letter, he dined at the Palais Royal and then shot himself in the heart.

Between Wealth and Intellect, observes Spengler, there was an unspoken pact of mutual resistance to, and contempt for, the common enemy, Blood. Intellect provided the justification for what Wealth brought about by brute omnipotence—the destruction of privilege and the dethronement of irrational, arbitrary selection on the basis of birth, in the interests of rational selection on the basis of talent and wealth. “Who would have believed,” says the same Rivarol, “that it was not the level of debt, or the
lettres de cachet
, or any other of the abuses of power—not even the
intendants
—that provoked revenge, nor was it the interminable tardiness of the justice system that so enraged the nation, but the privileges of the nobility; as is confirmed by the fact that it was the bourgeoisie, the writers, the financiers and all those who envied them, who stirred up the little people in the capital and the peasantry in their villages.”

Chamfort complained that he could never afford to keep a coach under the Ancien Régime, when his weak constitution made it absolutely necessary for him to have one. But he later remarked:

“I only continued to believe in the Revolution while there were so many coaches they knocked people over in the streets.”

“In 1782,” Sainte Beuve explains, “everyone wanted their own carriage, but because they couldn’t all have one, they demanded in 1792 that nobody should.”

But that brings to mind the much-maligned Hegel’s always valid lesson: “The
Weltgeist
uses human selfishness, envy and other passions as the moving force that drives humanity towards its goal, the unacknowledged but ultimate goal of history—freedom”. And that remains true even if we don’t believe in the great German
Weltgeist
.

When the besieged fortress finally fell, two different processes came to an end: the attackers had seized and occupied it, but the besieged, whether willingly or unwillingly, had already consented to its being taken. And when the monarchy was brought down in the Revolution, that event also had two sides. The Third Estate and the people demolished the ancient edifice, but the nobility and the monarchy allowed them to do so. And this second element is perhaps just as important as the first. The French aristocracy and the monarchy itself, in very large measure, contributed to the making of the Revolution. This is the key to our symbolic narrative, and its true meaning.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, as we have said, that great if gradual shift of sensibility came about to which we assign the all-embracing term ‘pre-romantic’. But in the France of Louis XVI there were signs of another shift in taste which it would be difficult to link with pre-romantic sentimentality and restlessness. At first glance it would seem to be an omen of a very different kind.