The Lost King of France: The Tragic Story of Marie-Antoinette's Favourite Son

The marriage ceremony took place later that day in the gilt and white chapel at Versailles. In this regal setting, Bourbon kings were traditionally christened and married, secure in the knowledge of their ‘divine right’ as monarch. Standing before the carved marble altar, the Dauphin, dressed in cloth of gold studded with diamonds, found the whole procedure something of an ordeal. ‘He trembled excessively during the service,’ wrote one eyewitness. ‘He appeared to have more timidity than his little wife and blushed up to his eyes when he gave [her] the ring.’ Marie-Antoinette, her slender figure seeming lost in her voluminous white brocade gown, was sufficiently nervous that when she signed the register, she spilt some ink.

The ceremony was followed by a grand reception in the Galerie des Glaces for over six thousand guests and a sumptuous wedding feast in the Opera House, which was inaugurated in their honour. Afterwards, following customary French etiquette, the bride and groom were prepared for bed in a very public ritual where the king himself gave the nightshirt to his grandson. Yet for all the weeks of imposing preparations in anticipation of this happy moment, when the sheets were checked in the morning, there was no evidence that the marriage had been consummated.

While the ageing king ‘was enchanted with the young Dauphine’, observed her First Lady of the Bedchamber, Henriette Campan – ‘all his conversation was about her graces, her vivacity, and the aptness of her repartees’ – her new husband was not so appreciative. Rumours soon began to circulate that the Dauphin was impotent or had difficulty making love. He showed only ‘the most mortifying indifference, and a coldness which frequently degenerated into rudeness’, continues Madame Campan, whose memoirs as the queen’s maid convey many intimate details of Marie-Antoinette’s early years in France. ‘Not even all her charms could gain upon his senses; he threw himself as a matter of duty upon the bed of the Dauphine, and often fell asleep without saying a single word to her!’ When Marie-Antoinette expressed her concerns in a letter to her mother, the empress advised her not to be too impatient with her husband, since increasing his uneasiness would only make matters worse. None the less, Marie-Antoinette was worried and ‘deeply hurt’ by his lack of physical interest in her.

The Dauphin was, in fact, a serious, well-intentioned young man who suffered from a chronic lack of confidence and self-assertiveness. As a child, Louis had felt himself to be in the shadow of his brothers; first his brilliant older brother, who had died at the age of ten, and then his younger brothers, the clever and calculating Comte de Provence – who wanted the throne for himself – and the handsome Comte d’Artois. To add to his sense of insecurity, when Louis was eleven his father had died of tuberculosis, to be followed soon afterwards by his mother – a loss which he felt deeply. Increasingly anxious about whether he was equal to his future role, he withdrew, absorbing himself in his studies, especially history, or pursuing his passion for the hunt. Somewhat incongruously for a future king, he also loved lock-making and had a smithy and forge installed next to his library. Marie-Antoinette did not share his interest in history or reading and thought his smithying quite ridiculous. ‘You must agree that I wouldn’t look very beautiful standing in a forge,’ she told a friend. Her mother, the empress, was increasingly concerned about their apparent incompatibility.

For the public, however, the fortunate young couple symbolised all the promise of new age. When Louis and Marie-Antoinette made their first ceremonial entrance into Paris on 8 June 1773, there was jubilant cheering. Their cortège clattered across the streets of the capital, which had been strewn with flowers. ‘There was such a great crowd,’ wrote Marie-Antoinette, ‘that we remained for three-quarters of an hour without being able to go forwards or backwards.’ When they finally appeared on the balcony of the palace of the Tuileries, the crowds were ecstatic and their cheers increased as the Dauphine smiled. Hats were thrown in the air with abandon, handkerchiefs were waving and everyone was enthusiastic. ‘Madame, they are two hundred thousand of your lovers,’ murmured the governor of Paris, the Duc de Brissac, as he saw the sea of admiring faces.

The following year, their protected lives were to change dramatically. On 27 April 1774, Louis XV was dining with his mistress when he became feverish with a severe headache. The next day, at Versailles, he broke out in a rash. The diagnosis was serious: smallpox. Within a few days, as his body became covered with foul-smelling sores, it was apparent that the king was suffering from a most virulent form of the disease. Louis and Marie-Antoinette had no chance to pay their last respects; they were forbidden to visit him. In less than two weeks the once handsome body in his exquisite gilded bed festooned in gold brocade appeared to be covered in one huge, unending black scab.

For those who could not come near the sick room, a candle had been placed near the window, which was to be extinguished the instant the king died. Louis and Marie-Antoinette were waiting together, watching the flickering light at the window with growing apprehension. When the flame went out, ‘suddenly a dreadful noise, absolutely like thunder’, wrote Madame Campan, was heard in the outer apartment. ‘This extraordinary tumult … was the crowd of courtiers who were deserting the dead sovereign’s antechamber to come and bow to the new power of Louis XVI.’ The courtiers threw themselves on their knees with cries of ‘Le roi est mort: vive le roi!’ The whole scene was overwhelming for the nineteen-year-old king and his eighteen-year-old queen. ‘Pouring forth a flood of tears, [they] exclaimed: “God guide and protect us! We are too young to govern.”’

The coronation ceremony was held on a very hot day in June 1775. Louis-Auguste walked up the aisle of Rheims cathedral dressed in stately splendour and bearing the sword of Charlemagne. He was anointed with oil and the crown of France was solemnly lowered onto his head. Such was the magnificence of the occasion and the jubilation of the crowds that Marie-Antoinette was overwhelmed and had to leave the gallery to wipe away her tears. When she returned the spectators in the packed cathedral cheered once again and the king’s eyes were full of appreciation for his young wife. ‘Even if I were to live for two hundred years,’ Marie-Antoinette wrote ecstatically to her mother, she would never forget the wonderful day. ‘I can only be amazed by the will of Providence that I, the youngest of your children, should have become queen of the finest kingdom in Europe.’

However, ‘the finest kingdom in Europe’ that Louis-Auguste and Marie-Antoinette had inherited was not all that it appeared. The visible outward signs of great wealth that greeted them every day in the sheer size and opulence of Versailles disguised a huge national debt. Their predecessors, Louis XIV and Louis XV, had pursued policies that had driven France to the verge of bankruptcy. A succession of expensive wars had aggravated the problem. In the War of Austrian Succession, spanning 1740 to 1748, France had fought as an ally of Prussia against Austria, the Netherlands and Britain. Eight years later, between 1756 and 1763, Louis XV reversed France’s historic hostility to Austria by allying with them against Britain and Prussia in the Seven Years’ War. These two wars alone cost France 2.8 billion livres (around twenty-four livres to the pound), much of which could only be paid by borrowing.

These problems were compounded by an ancient system of taxation that exacted more from the poor than the rich. The fast-growing population of France was divided into three ‘estates’. The First Estate consisted of around one hundred thousand clergy. The Second Estate comprised almost half a million nobility. The Third Estate were the commoners, the vast majority of the population, consisting of the peasants, wage earners and bourgeoisie. Under this increasingly despised system, the first two estates, the clergy and nobility, were largely exempt from taxes, even though they were the wealthiest. They also enjoyed traditional privileges over the Third Estate, whose members could rarely achieve high rank, such as officer, in the army.

As a result of tax exemptions for the nobility and clergy, the tax base was small and fell disproportionately on those least able to pay. Louis XV had repeatedly failed to tackle the problem of tax reform; time and time again, he faced opposition from nobles and clergy who were not going to give up their tax concessions. Since he could not raise money by increasing taxation, he was obliged to borrow still more. By the 1770s the government deficit was huge and growing, as annual expenditure continued to exceed revenue.

The unjust system of taxation underlined huge disparities in wealth. Peasants felt increasingly insecure as many found that their incomes were dwindling and their debts were rising. Their problems were compounded by the fact that France was still almost entirely an agricultural nation. Only around half a million people produced manufactured goods, so there were few exports to cover the cost of imports of wheat when the harvest failed. One traveller, François de la Rochefoucauld, commenting on the incredible hardships of the peasants he observed in Brittany, declared, ‘they really are slaves … their poverty is excessive. They eat a sort of porridge made of buckwheat; it is more like glue than food’. Indeed, the extreme wealth of the nobles in their magnificent chateaux in contrast to the wretched poverty of many of the people could not have been more plain for all to see.

In eighteenth-century France there was no institutional framework that would readily allow Louis XVI to tackle these fundamental problems. Administratively it was a fragmented nation, each region with completely separate customs, taxes, even different measurements and weights. Each region jealously protected its own interests and independence, which had grown up around local parlements, thirteen in all. These parlements were not like the English parliament of elected representatives. They were lawcourts of magistrates and lawyers who had paid for their seats, and who used them, not to represent the people, but principally to further their own interests. Although the king could formally overrule a parlement or dissolve it, conflicts with the parlements had been a feature of Louis XV’s reign and had stifled modernising reforms.

As Absolute Monarch, the king had authority over the military and the national system of justice, and could determine levels of taxation and influence the clergy. The difficulty was in exercising this power when the country was politically divided. Louis XVI faced a situation where no section of society was satisfied. The nobles wanted to restore ancient rights and to resist any tax changes, the bourgeoisie resented the privileges of the nobles, and the commoners criticised the tax system. The British ambassador, Lord David Murray Stormont, captured the difficulties: ‘every instrument of faction, every court engine is constantly at work, and the whole is such a scene of jealousy, cabal and intrigue that no enemy need wish it more.’ As a young, rather idealistic man, Louis XVI earnestly wished to enhance the reputation of the monarchy and build a more prosperous France, yet he knew this would require major unpopular reforms.

One of the king’s first priorities was to cut back the nation’s debt. To do this he had to reduce state expenditure, starting with Versailles. Versailles just soaked up money; the palace was in need of repair and some servants had not been paid for years. Even before he was king, Louis spent nearly a quarter of his allowance in back payment to staff. He continued to be strict about the royal family’s spending and repaying debts. Provence, Artois and their wives were ordered to eat with him and the queen at Versailles to minimise demands on their own expensive households, and he discouraged the many extravagant noblemen at court from living beyond their means.

He appointed as finance minister Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, who tried to increase state revenue by stimulating the economy. He removed restrictions on the grain trade between the thirteen different regions and promoted light industry by suppressing the powerful guilds which would not allow non-members to practise a trade. This was achieved with some success. Louis was also able to introduce other reforms. He passed measures to improve the appalling state of prisons in France and abolished the barbaric practice of torturing accused prisoners which, up until then, had been regarded as a legitimate means to get at the truth of a man’s innocence or guilt. However, for all his humanitarian instincts, he failed to get to grips with tax reform, and the nation’s debt continued to rise.

While Louis XVI was trying to come to terms with his role as king, Marie-Antoinette was creating her new life as queen. She quickly understood that she was barred from politics but soon found there were other ways of exercising her power at Versailles. As Dauphine she had made no secret of the fact that she disliked the time-consuming, exacting etiquette and formality of the French court where, she felt, her life was lived ‘in front of the whole world’. Depending on their rank, courtiers could attend the rising or lever of the monarch and his family, and in the evening the ceremony for undressing, or coucher. For the all too frequent public meals, or grand couvert, the royal family could be watched dining by any member of the public who was suitably attired.

The queen’s disregard for ceremony shocked the more traditional courtiers in Versailles, who observed her on occasion to yawn or giggle during an event, perhaps disguising her expression with her fan. Needless to say, the young queen was continually reproved by her advisor on social etiquette, Madame de Noailles. Yet ‘Madame Etiquette’, as Marie-Antoinette called her, failed to inspire her protégée with the significance of these rituals. ‘Madame de Noailles held herself bolt upright with a most severe face,’ observed Madame Campan, and ‘merely succeeded in boring the young princess.’ It wasn’t long before Madame Etiquette lost her post altogether and this was followed by many relaxations in court ceremony. Madame Campan, who had lived at Versailles since her youth when she was employed as reader to the princesses of Louis XV, was concerned at the harm this might do her mistress: ‘an inclination to substitute by degrees the simple customs of Vienna for those of Versailles, proved more injurious to her than she could have possibly imagined.’ Her insensitivity to the French way of doing things was adding to the slowly creeping distrust of a foreign queen.

As Marie-Antoinette gained confidence, she began to place her own stamp on court life. She soon found she could patronise friends of her own choosing, such as the Princesse de Lamballe, of the house of Savoy. They had become friends at a winter sledge party, where, according to Madame Campan, the princess, ‘with all the brilliancy and freshness of youth, looked like Spring peeping from under sable and ermine’. Lamballe had been widowed at nineteen, when her husband died of syphilis. Marie-Antoinette found in her a sensitive confidante and soon appointed her Superintendent of the Queen’s Household, a move that caused uproar since there were others whose rank made them much more suited for the post. Unlike the Princesse de Lamballe, another intimate friend, Gabrielle de Polignac, was drawn from the impoverished nobility. Gabrielle was a generous-spirited, level-headed girl with a taste for simplicity. The queen found her husband an official position at Versailles so that Gabrielle, too, could live at the court. It wasn’t long before the queen was bestowing favours to numerous other members of the Polignac family.

With her newfound friends, Marie-Antoinette’s life became more fun and increasingly indulgent: a whirlwind of masked balls, plays and operas in Paris, race meetings and hunting parties. Even Madame Campan, who invariably writes appreciatively of her mistress, was critical. ‘Pleasure was the sole pursuit of everyone of this young family, with the exception of the king,’ she wrote. ‘Their love of it was perpetually encouraged by a crowd of those officious people, who by anticipating their desires … hoped to gain or secure favour for themselves.’ Who would have dared, she asks, to check the amusements of this young, lively and handsome queen? ‘A mother or husband alone, had the right to do it!’ Although the king rarely joined her for these social events, he threw no impediment in her way. ‘His long indifference had been followed by feelings of admiration and love. He was a slave to all the wishes of the queen.’ However, her mother, hearing of these indulgences, was quick to warn Marie-Antoinette in frequent letters from Austria: ‘I foresee nothing but grief and misery for you.’

Gambling soon became another irresistible occupation for the young queen, who managed to accumulate heavy debts, which her husband settled from his private income. Constantly frugal himself, Louis failed to impose this self-discipline on his young wife. Worse criticism was to come when she began to ring up bills for diamonds, followed by more diamonds, in increasing size and quantity, until her mother wrote in some distraction: ‘a Queen can only degrade herself by such impossible behaviour and degrades herself even more by this sort of heedless extravagance, especially in difficult times … I hope I shall not live to see the disaster which is all too likely to occur.’ Marie-Antoinette replied, ‘I would not have thought anyone could have bothered you about such bagatelles.’

Inevitably all this played into the hands of the rumour-mongers. Malicious gossip soon spread about how much money the queen was spending. Apart from jewels and clothes – around 170 creations a year – not to mention her famous hairdresser, Léonard Hautier, who came out from Paris each day to create a powdered, coiffured fantasy up to three feet high, she also lavished money on the Petit Trianon. This was an elegant neoclassical pavilion about a mile from Versailles given to her by the king, which she refurbished to her own taste, including the creation of an English-style garden. This little private heaven was a place where Marie-Antoinette could escape the suffocating etiquette of court and enjoy being informal with her friends; but of course, the money poured into the Petit Trianon, together with enormous sums spent on generously favouring her friends, created jealousy and hostility amongst those who were not so favoured. Courtiers frustrated not to be part of her inner circle maliciously called the Petit Trianon ‘Little Vienna’.

Marie-Antoinette’s Austrian blood still rankled with many in France. All too many nobles had had relatives killed by Austrians in recent wars or at least had fought against Austrian troops. The queen’s apparent contempt for French customs soon made her enemies among the nobility. ‘Apart from a few favourites … everyone was excluded from the royal presence,’ complained one nobleman, the Duc de Lévis-Mirepoix. ‘Rank, service, reputation, and birth were no longer enough to gain admittance.’ Some nobles, he said, stayed away from Versailles rather than endure snubs from such a young, apparently light-headed and frivolous foreigner.

Yet she was not without admirers; she particularly cultivated the good-looking and fashionable men, such as the king’s youngest brother, Artois. With his cosmopolitan air and ease with women, he was only too happy to oblige the king and escort the queen to countless social events. On one occasion, in January 1774, at a masquerade at the opera in Paris, through her grey velvet mask Marie-Antoinette found herself talking to a tall, attractive man with a somewhat serious expression. He was finishing a European grand tour and, as he talked, she realised he had a delightful Swedish accent. Always drawn to a foreigner, she became interested in this aristocratic stranger who was so at ease in Parisian high society. The glamorous Count Axel Fersen made an instant impression.

Not surprisingly, her relationship with her husband was under strain. Anxious about his new role as king, he seemed intimidated by this sophisticated and beautiful wife whom he could not satisfy. ‘The king fears her, rather than loves her,’ observed one courtier, who noticed the king seemed much happier and more relaxed when she was absent. Marie-Antoinette, in turn, chose the company of young men full of energy and wit who would flatter and amuse her; she found it difficult to be patient with such a dull and unexciting husband. Yet they both wanted the marriage to succeed and, in particular, they both wanted an heir.

However, as the years passed, no heir was produced, which incited much malicious gossip. In the autumn of 1775, five years into the marriage, Parisian women were heard shouting revolting obscenities at Marie-Antoinette at a race meeting, mocking her for not giving birth to a dauphin. In the same year she wrote to her mother to tell her about the birth of Artois’ first son, the Duc d’Angoulême, now third in line to the throne. ‘There’s no need to tell you, dear Mama, how much it hurts me to see an heir to the throne who isn’t mine.’ Despite this pressure, Louis remained, to say the least, rather uninterested in sex. The best doctors were consulted and various diagnoses were made, although no serious impediment to the match was found. Marie-Antoinette told her mother that she tried to entice her husband to spend more time with her, and reported enthusiastically early in 1776 that ‘his body seemed to be becoming firmer’.

The empress, however, required much more than this to seal the all-important political alliance. The following year, in April 1777, Marie-Antoinette’s brother, now the Emperor Joseph, came to visit Versailles, charged, amongst other things, with trying to ascertain why no heir was forthcoming. Joseph was enchanted with his sister, whom he described as ‘delightful … a little young and inclined to be rash, but with a core of honesty and virtue that deserves respect’. It would appear from Joseph’s private letters afterwards to his brother Leopold of Tuscany that during his six-week stay he did not shrink from probing the intimate details of their marriage: ‘In the conjugal bed, here is the secret. He [Louis] has excellent erections, inserts his organ, remains there without stirring for perhaps two minutes, and then withdraws without ever discharging and, still erect, he bids his wife goodnight. It is incomprehensible.’ Joseph continued, ‘he ought to be whipped, to make him ejaculate, as one whips donkeys!’ As for Marie-Antoinette, he wrote that she was not ‘amorously inclined’, and together they were ‘a couple of awkward duffers!’

Joseph reproved his sister for not showing her husband more affection. ‘Aren’t you cold and disinterested when he caresses you or tries to speak to you?’ he challenged her. ‘Don’t you look bored, even disgusted? If it’s true, then how can you possibly expect such a cold-blooded man to make love to you?’ Marie-Antoinette evidently took his advice to heart. That summer she was elated to tell her mother that at last she had experienced ‘the happiness so essential for my entire life’. The king and queen’s sexual awakening brought them closer together and, early the following year, she reported that ‘the king spends three or four nights a week in my bed and behaves in a way that fills me with hope’. Some weeks later Marie-Antoinette proudly announced to her husband that she was at last expecting a baby. Louis was overjoyed.

On 19 December 1778 Marie-Antoinette went into labour. At Versailles a royal birth, like eating or dressing, was a public ritual, open to spectators who wished to satisfy themselves that the new baby was born to the queen. As the bells rang out, ‘torrents of inquisitive persons poured into the chamber’, wrote Madame Campan. The rush was ‘so great and tumultuous’ that it was impossible to move; some courtiers were even standing on the furniture. ‘So motley a gathering,’ protested the First Lady of the Bedchamber, ‘one would have thought oneself in a place of public amusement!’ Finally, when the baby was born, there was no sound, and Marie-Antoinette began to panic, thinking it was stillborn. At the first cry, the queen was so elated and exhausted by the effort that she was quite overcome. ‘Help me, I’m dying,’ she cried as she turned very pale and lost consciousness.