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

In the hope of bringing order to the disintegrating condition of the state, Louis came under increasing pressure to summon an ancient institution known as the Estates-General. This comprised elected representatives of three great medieval orders or estates: the clergy, the nobles and the commoners. The Estates-General was only summoned in times of crisis; Louis was only too aware that such a meeting might undermine his authority still further. The last time the Estates-General had sat, in 1614, they had only become a forum for disagreement and conflict. Yet the whole nation seemed to be demanding its recall. In late August, responding to popular demand, he reappointed his former finance minister, Jacques Necker. Lurching from one policy to another, increasingly unable to stave off bankruptcy, Louis became trapped. Finally, he agreed to summon the Estates-General to Versailles the following year. It was a desperate gamble.

When the Estates-General had last met 174 years previously, it had had an equal number of representatives from each estate, in which the First Estate, the clergy, and the Second Estate, the nobility, could always combine together to outvote the Third Estate, the commoners. When the restored parlement demanded the same arrangement this time, there was outrage and further riots. Louis decided to right this imbalance by giving the commoners as many representatives as the nobility and clergy together, but he neglected to say whether the voting would be by ‘order’ or by head. What had initially begun as a protest by the clergy and nobles against the powers of the king to raise their taxes had now set in motion a chain of events in which all sections in France sought to exert greater political power. Even the elements seemed ranged against Louis. A very bad harvest was followed in 1788 by a viciously cruel winter in which many of the poor died of cold or starvation. Unrest was growing; robber bands pillaged the countryside. To many ordinary people the whole system in France seemed rotten; feelings against the king and queen hardened as deeply felt grievances were aired.

As the debates raged about the Estates-General, Marie-Antoinette watched anxiously over the declining health of her eldest son. ‘The young Prince fell, in a few months, from rude health into a condition which curved his spine, distorted and lengthened his face, and rendered his legs so weak that he was unable to walk without being supported like some broken old man,’ wrote Madame Campan. Still only six years old, his little body slowly became pitifully deformed as his tuberculosis spread. ‘He has one leg shorter than the other, and his spine is twisted and sticks out unnaturally,’ the queen confided to her brother, Emperor Joseph II, in February 1788. The next month the Dauphin was sent to the Château de Meudon with his governor, in the hopes that his health would recover with the fresh country air. The king visited his son no less than forty times over the summer months, eagerly looking for any sign of improvement. There was none.

The queen took comfort from her other two children. Marie-Thérèse, the eldest, she nicknamed Mousseline la Sérieuse on account of her serious, thoughtful manner. The Petite Madame took after her father in temperament, although she could be dignified sometimes to the point of seeming haughty. The queen reserved her strongest endearments for her youngest, Louis-Charles: ‘mon chou d’amour’. His blue eyes and blond hair resembled his mother’s and with his affectionate and playful personality he proved a most rewarding child. He enjoyed games of ‘wedding’ in the nursery with his friends and playing with sand or horses – his great aunts had given him eight small black ponies, which had been specially trained so he could ride them. Madame Campan observed, ‘his ruddy health and loveliness did, in truth, form a striking contrast to the languid look and melancholy disposition of his elder brother’. Increasingly the king and queen’s hopes for the future of their line were concentrated on this charming little ruler of the nursery who, at four and a half, was already wearing coat and trousers.

4 May 1789. The streets of Versailles were hung with tapestries for the magnificent opening procession to mark the historic gathering of the Estates-General. With great ceremony to mark this ‘rebirth’ of France – as some believed – the parade of two thousand people filed though the crowded streets for a service at the church of Saint Louis. The king walked behind the archbishop of Paris, followed by the royal family, then representatives of the three estates, each with lighted candles.

Marie-Antoinette, sumptuously bejewelled in a silver dress, ‘looked sad’ as she passed. Unable to take part, but watching the proceedings from a balcony, was her seven-year-old son, his twisted little body stretched on a day bed. She now knew he was dying and could scarcely hold back her tears as he smiled valiantly at her. At that moment some ‘low women’, according to Madame Campan, ‘yelled out “Vive le Duc d’Orléans!” in such a rebellious manner that the queen nearly fainted’. Many of the representatives, she wrote, arrived in Versailles with the ‘strongest prejudices’ against the queen, certain she ‘was draining the treasury of the state in order to satisfy the most unreasonable luxury’. Some demanded to see the Trianon, convinced that there was at least one room ‘totally decorated with diamonds, and columns studded with sapphires and rubies’. Disbelieving representatives searched the pavilion in vain for the diamond chamber.

The first session of the Estates-General met the next day in the opulent surroundings of the Salle des Menus Plaisirs in the palace. The clergy, in imposing scarlet and black ecclesiastical robes, were seated on benches on the right. The nobles, richly dressed in white-feathered hats and gold-trimmed suits, took the benches on the left. The commoners sat furthest from the king at the far end, dressed simply in black. One of those among them taking in the scene – the large ornate chamber, the symbolic ranking of the representatives with the Third Estate in plain clothes at the back – was a young lawyer called Maximilien Robespierre.

At the age of eleven Robespierre had won a scholarship to one of the most prestigious schools in France, Louis-le-Grand, in Paris. He had graduated in law in 1780 and returned to practise in his home town, Arras, in the northern province of Artois. When the Estates-General were summoned, he seized his chance to further his career and successfully secured a position as one of eight Third Estate deputies for Artois. Like many commoners, he arrived in Versailles determined to challenge the structures of privilege at the heart of French society and create social equality.

As the speeches and debates began, the great expectations that had preceded the opening of the Estates-General soon disintegrated. Far from even attempting to resolve the all-important financial crisis, which Necker outlined at great length, there were increasingly bitter arguments about voting procedures, with each estate continually plotting for positions of power over the others. As the weeks of May passed, rather than resolving the issue of tax reform, the meeting served as a catalyst, crystallising grievances at the very heart of the constitution of France.

At this time the queen was almost completely preoccupied with the Dauphin. The young prince suffered as his illness slowly destroyed every trace of childish vitality. When Princesse de Lamballe visited him at Meudon with her lady-in-waiting, they could hardly bear to look at his ‘beautiful eyes, the eyes of a dying child’. The queen watched helplessly as his emaciated body became covered in sores. ‘The things that the poor little one says are incredible; they pierce his mother’s heart; his tenderness towards her knows no bounds,’ observed a friend. On 2 June services were held for him across France and prayers were said. It was to no avail. Two days later he died in his mother’s arms.

The significance of these events was lost on the four-year-old Louis-Charles playing in the nursery at Versailles. He wept to hear of the death of his older brother, now lying in state at Meudon in a silver and white room, his coffin covered with a silver cloth, his crown and sword. All around him, the chambers of Versailles resounded to the acrimonious debates of the deputies. Louis-Charles had now become the symbol of the royal future of France, ‘Monsieur le Dauphin’, next in line to a throne increasingly devoid of authority as well as funds.

The king, somewhere during these events, private and public, missed his opportunity to rally the deputies and inspire their support. Overwhelmed with grief, he and the queen left Versailles to mourn their oldest son. In his absence, the deputies of the Third Estate seized the initiative. At a pivotal meeting on 17 June 1789, they passed a motion that since they represented ninety-five per cent of the people, the Third Estate should be renamed as a new body, called the ‘National Assembly’, which had the right to control taxation. With flagrant disregard for the king they planned to proceed, with or without royal approval.

While the king vacillated, hopelessly torn between the advice of ministers such as Necker who counselled compromise, and that of his wife and brothers who argued for a tougher line, the Third Estate went even further. When the deputies of the new National Assembly found themselves locked out of their usual meeting room, they adjourned to an indoor tennis court. Here each member solemnly swore not to separate until France had a new constitution. This became known as the ‘Tennis Court Oath’.

The king’s power was collapsing. His specially appointed Assembly of Notables had defied him, the Parlement had defied him, now the Third Estate was defying him. With each successive swipe at the monarchy, the king was racked with indecision. ‘All goes worse than ever,’ Madame Elisabeth reported frankly to her friend, the Marquise de Bombelles, as she confided her despair at her brother’s lack of the ‘necessary sternness’. Foreseeing disaster, she wrote, ‘the deputies, victims of their passions … are rushing to ruin, and that of the throne and the whole kingdom’. As for herself, she told the marquise ominously, ‘I have sworn not to leave my brother and I shall keep my oath.’

As support grew rapidly for the new National Assembly, the king was obliged to recognise it. He ordered the other two estates to join the Third. As a result, the commoners, who had had their representation doubled, now held a majority. Many took the Third’s victory and the king’s acquiescence as a sign that his authority had completely broken down. There was rioting on the streets; civil war seemed imminent. The king summoned extra regiments to Paris. He told the deputies of the National Assembly that the troops were stationed as a precaution, to protect the people. The deputies, however, saw the presence of twenty-five thousand troops in and around the capital differently and feared that they themselves were under direct threat from the king. One of them spoke out: ‘these preparations for war are obvious to everyone and fill every heart with indignation.’

On 12 July, following the dismissal of the popular finance minister, Necker, crowds gathered to hear rousing revolutionary speeches against the ‘tyranny’ of the monarchy, who it was feared was seeking to destroy the new National Assembly that represented the people. ‘Citizens, they will stop at nothing,’ urged one speaker, the journalist Camille Desmoulins, a schoolfriend of Robespierre. ‘They are plotting a massacre of patriots.’ People rushed to arm themselves. As a wave of panic swept the Paris streets, armourers and gunsmiths were raided – one later reported that he was looted no less than thirty times. The monastery of Saint Lazare, a depot for grain and flour, was sacked. The next day, at the Hôtel de Ville, Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of the American war, set out to enrol a new ‘National Guard’ with himself as colonel, creating a new citizens’ army. Early the next morning, on 14 July, around eighty thousand people gathered at the Invalides, the army’s barracks, where they overwhelmed the troops and managed to obtain thirty thousand muskets and some cannon. Faced with rumours that royal troops were on the move, the citizens’ army needed gunpowder and this was in the Bastille. The crowd swept forward, to rousing cries of ‘To the Bastille!’

The grey stone walls and menacing towers of this fourteenth-century fortress rose as a great, dark edifice on the Rue Saint Antoine in the eastern side of Paris. For years any enemies of the crown could be detained in this prison without a judicial process, merely by a royal warrant: the notorious lettres de cachet. Consequently, the almost windowless walls, five feet thick, rising sheer from the moat, had come to represent a mighty symbol of royal tyranny and oppression. The cry went up to seize the Bastille, take the gunpowder and release the prisoners. Revolt was fast turning into revolution.

As nine hundred men gathered around the Bastille, the atmosphere inside was tense. The governor, Marquis Bernard-René de Launay, gave orders for his guards to defend the prison at all cost. After midday, the mob broke through the first drawbridge and behind a smoke screen formed by burning two carts of manure, they aimed their guns at the gate and the second drawbridge. With the fortress under siege, the garrison fought back, killing almost one hundred of the assailants and injuring many more. Yet the mob continued to attack. The guards eventually surrendered, defying de Launay’s orders, and lowered the second drawbridge. The crowds, now out of control, surged forward into the fortress, breaking windows and furniture, and killing any guards who had not put down their weapons. The prisoners were released; for all the furor, there were only seven – including one madman.

In their lust for vengeance the excited crowd seized de Launay and dragged him towards the Hôtel de Ville, kicking him down until, unable to endure another moment, he screamed, ‘Let me die!’ As he lashed out, the crowd finished off their victim with hunting knives, swords and bayonets. Finally a cook named Désnot cut off his head with a pocket knife. The still dripping head was twisted onto a pike and paraded around the streets to the cheering crowd, described on a placard as ‘Governor of the Bastille, disloyal and treacherous enemy of the people’. For patriots, the fall of the Bastille created a wave of euphoria, and it would not be long before the prison was demolished entirely.

Faced with this new crisis, the king went to the National Assembly and effectively surrendered, promising to withdraw his troops from Paris. As the sense of desperation grew, many senior members of the Versailles court now fled. On the night of 16 July the king’s young brother, Artois, and the queen’s close friend, Gabrielle de Polignac, left the palace with their families. ‘Nothing could be more affecting than the parting of the queen and her friend,’ wrote Madame Campan. The queen ‘wished to go and embrace her once more’ after they had parted, but knowing that her movements were watched, was too frightened that she might give her friend away. The duchess ‘was disguised as a femme de chambre’, and instead of travelling in the waiting berline, stepped up in front with the coachman, like a servant.

After long discussions with his ministers, the king decided that the royal family would stay at Versailles. Madame Campan saw the queen tear up the papers ordering preparations for departure ‘with tears in her eyes’. She was in no doubt about the danger they faced. In the event of an attack on the palace, they might not even be able to count on the loyalty of the guard at Versailles to protect them. In a bold attempt to defuse the situation, Louis agreed to a request by the National Assembly to visit Paris. Marie-Antoinette begged him not to go. Locked in her rooms with her family, she sent for members of the court, only to find they had already fled. ‘Terror had driven them away,’ said Madame Campan; no one expected the king to return alive. ‘A deadly silence reigned throughout the palace.’

It was dark before the king returned. He had faced the crowd and was now wearing the red, white and blue cockade – soon to be the badge of the revolutionary – as he made his way back to his palace escorted by a citizens’ army. ‘Happily no blood has been shed,’ he told his family, ‘and I swear that never shall a drop of French blood be shed by my order.’

Only five days later Joseph Foulon, one of the ministers brought in to replace Necker, was recognised by the crowd and dragged to the Hôtel de Ville. ‘After tormenting him in a manner the particulars of which make humanity shudder,’ reported Campan, the people hanged him. ‘His body was dragged about the streets and his heart was carried – by women – in the midst of a bunch of white carnations!’ It had been rumoured that Foulon had said, ‘If the rogues haven’t any bread, they can have hay’. Now hay was stuffed in his mouth as his head was thrust on a pike and borne through the streets of Paris.

The terror in Paris ricocheted around the country in a wave of panic known as La Grande Peur. Angry mobs invaded the bastilles at Bordeaux and Caen; fighting broke out in the streets of Lyon, Rennes, Rouen and Saint Malo. With the harvest not yet in, the price of bread soared. Many feared that there was a plot to starve the people into submission. As the poor left their homes to scavenge for food it was widely believed that these vagrants were paid by the nobility to cause disruption and steal bread. Rumours were rife that the food shortages were exacerbated by the stockpiling of grain by the wealthy, including the royal family. As panic spread, peasants invaded the chateaux to exact bloody revenge on their masters.

At Versailles, the queen was increasingly concerned about the safety of her children. Following the departure of Gabrielle de Polignac, she chose as their governess the Marquise de Tourzel, a woman who combined ‘an illustrious ancestry with the most exemplary virtue’, according to the king. However, the marquise hesitated; she had children of her own and was under no illusion as to the ‘perils and responsibilities’ of the post. It was only the ‘spectacle of desertion’ by so many of their friends that persuaded her to accept.

On 24 July the queen wrote to the marquise with practical details of her new charges:

‘My son is two days short of being four years and four months old … His health has always been good, though even in his cradle we noticed that he was very nervous and upset by the slightest sudden noise … Because of delicate nerves he is always frightened by any noise to which he isn’t accustomed and for example, is afraid of dogs after hearing one bark near him.’

Despite these sensitivities, she portrays Louis-Charles as a good-natured child, ‘with no sense of conceit’ although he could, on occasion, be a little thoughtless. His greatest defect, wrote the queen, was his indiscretion: ‘he easily repeats what he has heard; and often without intending to lie, adds things according to his imagination. This is his greatest fault and must be corrected.’

‘My son has no idea of rank in his head and I would like that to continue: our children always find out soon enough who they are. He is very fond of his sister and has a good heart. Every time something makes him happy, a trip somewhere or a gift, his first impulse is to request the same for his sister. He was born cheerful; for his health he needs to be outside a great deal, and I think it is best for him to play and work on the terraces rather than have him go any further. The exercise taken by little children playing and running about in the open air is far healthier than making them go for long walks which often tire their backs.’

The queen instructed her new governess never to let him out of her sight. Finding the virtuous marquise stricter than her predecessor, it wasn’t long before the Dauphin dubbed her ‘Madame Sévère’.

During August 1789 the National Assembly moved quickly to destroy many of the pillars of the ancien régime, the previous or old order of France. On the night of the fourth, in a highly charged and emotional sitting, the nobles and clergy capitulated and agreed to relinquish all feudal privileges. All exemptions from taxation and a multitude of dues that peasants owed their landlords were abolished. It was the overthrow of feudalism. Over the next two weeks the National Assembly went further to try to establish equality throughout France in a ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’. In this declaration, ‘all men [were] born free and equal’ and every citizen had the right to decide what taxes should be imposed. It also set out a definition for fundamental human rights: freedom of speech, freedom from unlawful imprisonment, freedom of the press and religious liberty. The declaration was then given to the king at Versailles for his formal assent. He played for time and delayed approving the documents.

Feeling increasingly vulnerable at Versailles, in mid-September Louis summoned a thousand troops that he knew to be loyal from the northern frontier: the Flanders regiment. According to tradition, the king’s bodyguards held a celebratory dinner to welcome officers of the new regiment to Versailles. On 1 October a lavish banquet was prepared by the royal chef, and set up beneath the gold and blue canopies of the Opera House. ‘There were numerous orchestras in the room,’ says Madame Campan. ‘The rousing air, “O Richard! O mon roi” was played and shouts of “Vive le roi!” shook the roof for several minutes.’

The king and queen, who had not planned to attend, made an unexpected entrance with the Dauphin. Immediately the orchestra struck up. ‘People were intoxicated with joy,’ wrote Madame Campan. ‘On all sides were heard praises of Their Majesties, exclamations of affection, expressions of regret for what they had suffered, clapping of hands and shouts of “Vive le roi!” “Vive la reine!” “Vive le dauphin!”’ A highly charged atmosphere was created, with many tears and with officers dramatically saluting the king with their swords. At one point the young dauphin was lifted onto the horseshoe table at the centre of the stage. Rising to the occasion, he walked the length of the table, smiling at everyone as he carefully picked his way through the fine china and glassware. When the king and queen finally left, the theatre resounded with defiant shouts of ‘Down with the Assembly! Down with the Assembly!’ Yet there were spies everywhere and reports of the grand banquet spread like fire around Paris.

It was an incendiary piece of news: while people were almost starving in Paris, banquets were apparently being organised for counter-revolutionaries in Versailles. Reports became wildly exaggerated. The feast was no less than an orgy at which red, white and blue cockades were crushed underfoot, to gleeful shouts of ‘Down with the nation!’ Did not the queen personally distribute white rosettes to each person at the feast? That week in Paris bread was becoming increasingly scarce, with many bakeries completely out of supplies. By Sunday 4 October bread riots even led to one baker being hanged, accused of hoarding flour in the expectation of higher prices. Increasingly bitter charges were made against the queen. It was widely rumoured that she was planning the counter-revolution and had given instructions for the stockpiling of flour at Versailles, hoping to crush the people with famine. The queen became a lightning conductor for much of the fury and frustration in Paris.

Monday, 5 October. Church bells rang out around the Place de Grève by the Seine in Paris, traditionally the place used for executions and hangings. Women began to gather: the poissardes – or fishwives – and market women, servants and washerwomen converged on the square united by their desperate poverty and equally desperate need for bread, their anger and resolve strengthened by the sight of their own hungry children. Despite the rain, by early afternoon more than six thousand women had assembled, armed with anything they could find: pitchforks, scythes, kitchen knives, even skewers and sticks. Nothing could deter them; they had nothing to lose as they began to march the twelve miles to Versailles, with the now driving rain soaking their ill-clad bodies. Soon after they left, the National Guard of Paris, eager to support the women’s march, also began to assemble. By the late afternoon fifteen thousand National Guards set out for Versailles, reluctantly led by Lafayette.