For those who could not come near the sickroom, 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 splendor. He was anointed with oil and bore the sword of Charlemagne as 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 they had inherited was not all that it appeared. The visible outward signs of great wealth that greeted Marie-Antoinette 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, 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 100,000 clergy. Almost half a million nobility comprised the Second Estate.
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 taxation 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. Far from inheriting a wealthy nation, by the 1770s, the king faced a government deficit that 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
parlements
in all. These
parlements
were not like the English parliament of elected representatives. They were law
courts 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
parlement
had been a feature of Louis XV’s reign and had stifled modernizing reforms.
As absolute monarch, the king had authority over the military and the national system of justice, and he 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 criticized 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 minimize 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 that would not allow nonmembers to practice 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 have 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 patronize friends of her own choosing, such as the Princesse de Lamballe, of the royal House of Savoy. They had become friends at a winter sleigh 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, levelheaded 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 favors 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, as well as race meetings and hunting parties. Even Madame Campan, who invariably wrote 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 favor 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 admirations and love. He was a slave to all the wishes of the queen.” However, her mother, hearing of these indulgences, was quick to warn her daughter 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 ever increasing size and quantity until her mother in some distraction wrote, “A queen can only degrade herself by such impossible behavior 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 rumormongers. Malicious gossip soon spread about how much money she was spending. Apart from jewels and clothes—around 170 creations a year, not to mention her famous hairdresser, Leonard 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 favoring her friends, created jealousy and hostility among those who were not so favored. Courtiers frustrated not to be part of her inner circle maliciously called the Petit Trianon “Little Vienna.”
Her 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 favorites … everyone was excluded from the royal presence,” complained one nobleman, the Due 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.