During the trial of Louis XVI, Robespierre had invoked Marie Antoinette’s name only to make the point that she had no special status: “As for his [Louis’] wife, you will send her before the courts, like all other persons charged with similar crimes.” Jean Baptiste Mailhe, a lawyer from Toulouse and part of the more moderate “Plain” group in the Convention, as opposed to the radical “Mountain,” put across the same point: “Of Antoinette we have said nothing.” The ci-devant (former) Queen of France was no more sacred or inviolable than any other rebel or conspirator, and if there was a case to be made against her, it must be sent to an ordinary tribunal. Of this process, however, in the tense weeks following the King’s execution, there was no sign. Meanwhile it was relevant that one of the options considered at length during Louis’ trial had been banishment, including Paine’s enterprising suggestion of exile to the United States. “The banishment of all the Bourbons” was a revolutionary proposal, the reclamation of the former Archduchess a dynastic one, but they amounted to the same practical step: the departure of Marie Antoinette from France.15
In short, there seemed a real possibility that this humane procedure would take place. When Louis XVI, shortly before his death, had asked what would happen to those he left behind, he was told, reassuringly, that “the nation, always great and always just” would concern itself with the future of his family. In the first week of February, Claude Antoine Moëlle, a member of the Paris Commune who was one of the Temple’s commissioners, escorted Marie Antoinette up to her airing at the top of the Tower. She took the opportunity to ask him what the Convention intended to do with her. She would probably be reclaimed by the Emperor her nephew, replied Moëlle: “any new excess”—he meant her death—would be “a gratuitous horror” and contrary to policy.16 The execution of the King had provided the Convention with closure in its need for purging bloodshed. This conversation, at which Marie Thérèse was also present, allowed for hopes to rise, not only that there would be no trial but that the Queen would be freed.
The poor health of the Queen gave an added impetus to the idea of mercy. This did not improve as the immediate shock of her husband’s death wore off. Kucharski, who had been responsible for the portrait begun in 1791, now produced a yet more haggard image of the Queen in her widow’s weeds; he may have made sketches in the Temple from life before reproducing the portrait in many versions. Tuberculosis was rife in her family; it had killed her eldest brother and her elder son, among other relations; she may have been in the early stages of it. But the Queen was also unquestionably suffering from haemorrhages, which had been part of the pattern of her troubled gynaecological history for many years and which now increased in frequency. There are various alternative explanations for this. She may have been experiencing the early onset of the menopause (Marie Antoinette was thirty-seven); she may have been suffering from fibroids; third, and most plausibly in view of her deteriorating physical condition, she may have been exhibiting the first signs of cancer of the womb. Marie Antoinette, whose health had for some years worried the ladies who were her intimates, was certainly by now an ill woman.17
In May, Doctor Brunier had to be called to Marie Thérèse who was “at an age decisive for her sex.” (In her fifteenth year, Marie Thérèse was almost exactly the same age as Marie Antoinette had been when the latter reached puberty.) But the doctor also had to attend to the Queen, who was suffering from frequent “convulsions” and fainting fits.18 Whatever the cause, Marie Antoinette was not by now what would be termed a good life, let alone a threatening one.
Unfortunately, there were several elements that militated against the merciful release of Marie Antoinette. First and foremost must be listed the indifference of the young Emperor. Even the Emperor Joseph II—who really loved his sister—had made it clear as long ago as August 1789 that it was in his own interest “to be perfectly neutral in this business, no matter what may happen to the King and Queen.”19 For his part, Francis II was simply not concerned over the fate of the unhappy aunt he had never met and who, as an agent of Habtx1urg dynastic politics, it had to be said, had not fulfilled her function. It did not help the Queen’s cause, at home or abroad either, that the war now escalated. In the course of February crusading revolutionary France declared war on England, Spain and Holland. The tide, which had surged forward so strongly for the revolutionary armies under Dumouriez in the previous autumn, now turned in favour of the allies. The French had to evacuate Aix-la-Chapelle and abandon the siege of Maestricht, while the Austrians recovered Liège. It was inevitable that lethal political infighting in the Convention would, like the war itself, escalate. In such struggles between the Jacobins and the Girondins, Marie Antoinette was once again a miserable pawn.
Private plans of escape, irrespective of the Emperor’s intentions, were still afoot. One scheme involving the whole family was organized by “Fidèle” Toulan and Lep"tre inside and the Chevalier de Jarjayes outside. Contact with Jarjayes had never been entirely broken; there were letters in which, for example, “Roxane” stood for “la Reine,” “Lucius” for Jarjayes, “Fatime” probably for Madame Elisabeth and “the old friend Mercinus” rather more obviously for Mercy himself. The scheme planned for early March involved the smuggling in of padded military overcoats to disguise the women’s figures; wigs and battered and ragged trousers were intended for the children. The coasts of Normandy and England, once dismissed by the Queen, now promising salvation, were to be the target. The guardian Tisons, man and wife, were to be rendered insensible by narcotics mixed with their tobacco. Whether this latter-day “Varennes-type” scheme had any feasibility at all was never tested; first Lep"tre lost his nerve and muddled the process of obtaining false passports. Then agitation due to the bad news of the war and food riots in Paris caused the city’s barriers to be closed.20
The conspirators were left trying to persuade the Queen to escape alone, on the grounds that the rest of the family was not in danger. This Marie Antoinette resolutely refused to do, as she had always refused. “We had a beautiful dream and that was all,” Marie Antoinette told Jarjayes. “The interests of my son are the only guide I have, and whatever happiness I could achieve by being free of this place, I cannot consent to separate myself from him . . . I could not have any pleasure in the world if I abandoned my children,” she wrote, adding, “I do not even have any regrets.”21
Instead of attempting to flee herself, Marie Antoinette made a noble gesture of renunciation in favour of her two brothers-in-law. She despatched secretly via Jarjayes the silver seal with the lockets of hair to “Monsieur, Comte de Provence” (no mention here of “Regent”) with a note signed M.A. This had a touching postscript from the two children “M.T.” and “Louis” (the simple name by which a monarch would sign himself). The girl wrote it “on behalf of my brother and myself.” Both embraced their uncle “with all their hearts,” Madame Elisabeth adding her own initials at the end. Comte d’Artois got the engraved wedding ring; he was asked by Marie Antoinette to receive it as a symbol of their most tender friendship, Madame Elisabeth adding to her brother: “How I have suffered for you.”22
Jarjayes had a second clandestine mission: to take an impression of the Queen’s seal to “the person you know came to see me last winter from Brussels” and to tell him at the same time that “the device has never been more true.” This was Count Fersen who had spent that single night at the Tuileries in February 1792. The motto was “Tutto a te mi guida”—All things lead me towards you. The device was a pigeon in flight, which, Fersen noted in his Journal intime, was a mistake for his own arms which actually showed a flying fish. It took Jarjayes many months to get the impression to Fersen, and when he did receive it, it was, by coincidence, on the first anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI, a tragic memory that for Fersen would “never be effaced.” However, the text of the message, surviving in two virtually identical versions—the Queen’s letter to Jarjayes, and Fersen’s notification of it in his Journal intime—make it clear that the bond
between them, dependent and romantic on her side, romantic and chivalrous on his, had not been broken. This was the language of Julie to Saint-Preux in La Nouvelle Héloïse: “Our souls touch at all points . . . Fate may indeed separate us but not disunite us.”23
Lep"tre, Toulan and others were interrogated for over-indulgence of the royal prisoners at the end of March on the word of the Tisons; Toulan was dismissed from the Tower. In other ways, the regime tightened. There were sudden night-time searches, intended to take the family by surprise but actually causing great fear and inconvenience. Not much was discovered beyond religious objects—pictures of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and a prayer for France. The man who led the searches was Jacques Hébert, founder of the newspaper Le Père Duchesne, which was the leading organ of the extremist Cordeliers. He, however, was a formidable adversary, and not someone to whom the Queen’s plight or that of her children was likely to appeal.
On 18 March the Austrian army, under the Prince of Saxe-Coburg, inflicted a terrible defeat upon the French at Neerwinden, north-west of Liège. As a result the Austrians were able to retake Brussels and drive the French back out of the Austrian Netherlands. At the same time the Spanish crossed the French borders in the south. And in the Vendée the recent royalist rising was spreading rapidly. Nine days after Neerwinden, Robespierre in the Convention focused once more on Marie Antoinette’s continued presence in the Temple—and the unresolved question of her punishment. It was manifestly intolerable that one “no less guilty” than the late Louis Capet, “no less accused by the Nation,” should be left in peace to enjoy the fruit of her crimes out of some residue of superstitious respect for royalty.24 Robespierre suggested to the Convention that the former Queen should be brought before the new Revolutionary Tribunal, which had been set up on 10 March, for her crimes against the state. Such notional crimes of “the Austrian woman” were given further prominence when General Dumouriez, no longer the victorious revolutionary leader but the defeated general, absconded to the Austrians. Antoinette in the Tower was smeared by association.
On 6 April a new Committee of Public Safety was set up. Limited at first to nine members (including Danton) and meeting in secret, it would with time take over the conduct of the war. The next day Philippe Égalité and his third son, the ci-devant Comte de Beaujolais, were arrested. With other aristocrats, Orléans’ sister—“Citizeness Bourbon”—the Prince de Conti and Orléans’ second son, Montpensier, they were sent to prison in Marseilles. It was as well for his own sake that Orléans’ father-in-law, the Duc de Penthièvre, whose “noble bearing” and “loftiest virtues” had made him the last living link with “the glory” that was his ancestors, did not live to see this day. This surviving grandson of Louis XIV had had his heart broken by the death of his beloved daughter-in-law the Princesse de Lamballe. It was a fate that he was said to have offered in vain a fortune to avert. But the shameful vote of his son-in-law for the death of the King was the ultimate blow and he never recovered, dying on 4 March.25
The events of the end of May, which led to the overthrow of the Girondins as a party and the arrest of their leaders, had their impact on the Temple in the shape of yet greater security. Bars were put on the windows and shutters that were not always opened; the searches were increased. In spite of this, there was a pitiful if valiant attempt at rescue in June. It was instigated by the eccentric Baron de Batz, a man brave or foolhardy enough to try a last-minute rescue of the King on the scaffold, with the help of one of the police administrators of the prison, named Michonis. It failed when Simon was tipped off to the possibility of Michonis’ treachery and paid an unscheduled late-night visit. Michonis talked his way out of trouble, suggesting that the whole incident had been a joke played on Simon.26
Attempts at exchanging Marie Antoinette for some of the French prisoners—four commissioners of the Convention—who had been brought over to Austria by Dumouriez when he fled to the allied side were no more successful. The imperial heart was not in it and by the beginning of August no progress had been made. Although the first-hand evidence vanished later for political reasons, it seems that Danton, a member of the Committee for Public Safety, also tried to negotiate some kind of deal with Francis II. But the latter was not prepared to make any concessions in return. In the meantime Marie Antoinette herself refused to consider a release that did not include her son. Maternal anxiety was interpreted by Danton as dynastic ambition and so that plan—insofar as it ever existed—collapsed.27
In mid-June the Pope announced the late King of France to be a royal martyr, killed purely for his religion: “O triumphal day for Louis! . . . We are sure that he has exchanged the fragile royal crown and the ephemeral lilies for an eternal crown decorated with the immortal lilies of the angels.” Two weeks later the real-life martyrdom of Marie Antoinette commenced. On the night of 3 July, commissioners arrived at the Tower and brusquely informed the Queen that her son was to be separated from her. They read the decree that the Convention had issued to this effect the day before, which had been spurred on by reports—without substance—that there was a plot to abduct the “young King.” He was now to be removed to “the most secure apartment of the Tower.”28
Louis Charles flung himself into his mother’s arms, giving loud cries, and for her part Marie Antoinette behaved like a tigress whose cub was being taken away. For the next hour she absolutely refused to release her son. Threats to kill her left the Queen unmoved; only threats to kill Marie Thérèse produced some kind of reaction. In the end there was no way she could resist such an array of force any longer. Marie Antoinette no longer had the strength to dress her son—that was done by Marie Thérèse and her aunt—but had to be content with wiping his tears away.29
Louis Charles was aged eight years and three months; he had spent nearly half his life in captivity of one sort or another. He had become unnaturally circumspect and, above all, anxious to please. The rude “peasant” health of which Marie Antoinette had once boasted to Princesse Louise was beginning to deteriorate in the confining conditions of the Tower. He had suffered from a fever in May and in June he was found to have a hernia in the groin. The celebrated truss-maker Hippoy Le Pipelet was allowed to bandage him. Pipelet noted that Louis Charles had also suffered an accident, which seemed insignificant at the time, if painful, but was to have grim consequences. He reported to the Temple authorities that Louis Charles, using a stick as a hobby-horse, had managed to bruise one of his testicles.30
That night and for many nights to come, the family left behind listened to the boy’s sobbing, still audible from where he was kept. Marie Antoinette became obsessed with the prospect of having just one little glimpse of Louis Charles as he passed on his way to his exercise. There was one position in their apartments from where, by craning her neck, she could just see him as he passed. She spent whole days trying to do this. As Maria Carolina expressed it to her daughter, the wife of Francis II, just when “time and resignation” seemed to have formed “healing scars” following the King’s death, Marie Antoinette’s wounds had been “torn open again.”31
Like all separations of children from parents in the name of ideology, this aim to retrain—or brainwash—the former Dauphin was heart-rending for his family. Mayor Chaumette had declared the previous year: “I wish to give him [Louis Charles] some education. I will take him from his family to make him lose the idea of his rank.”32 The carrying out of this policy meant that Marie Antoinette’s chou d’amour, petted, protected and loved in the way that few eighteenth-century children were, was given over to the altogether rougher care of the cobbler Simon. The new guardian was supposed to toughen up the little Capet and this he proceeded to do. The boy was beaten for crying so after a bit he ceased to cry. He was given wine, became tipsy and amused his jailers. He was taught their rough language, their obscenities, and, since it pleased them, took on such a way of talking as his own. This was simply the brutal way that the children of the people were tamed, and Louis Charles was thought to be a prime candidate
for taming.
Marie Antoinette’s own turn came a month later. It was once again the direction of the war that provoked a new official move against her. Many of the French soldiers were distracted in the west with the rebels of the Vendée. On 23 July the Austrian alliance recaptured Mainz. Then three days later they took Valenciennes, a victory that meant that Paris itself, too easily reached down the valley of the Oise, was in danger. On 1 August, Barrère, president of the Convention and a member of the Committee of Public Safety, deliberately established the lethal connection. Was it “our over-long forgetfulness of the Austrian woman’s crimes . . . our strange indifference towards the Capet family” that had given the nation’s enemies a mistaken impression of its weakness?33 If so, that could be remedied, and remedied immediately.
The security for the transfer of Marie Antoinette to the prison known as the Conciergerie was prodigious. All the doors of the Temple were checked during the day and the guards were told to regard themselves as being in a state of siege. At eight o’clock in the evening, the artillery in the courtyard was instructed to hold itself in readiness. It was a very hot, stuffy night, almost exactly a year since that hot night preceding a red dawn when the Tuileries had been stormed.