The Bourbon Kings of France (25 page)

A much more popular new minister was Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, whom Louis put in charge of foreign affairs. In his mid-fifties, Vergennes was an experienced diplomat, a former ambassador to Sweden and Turkey, and very unlike Turgot—beautifully dressed, impassive-faced and with all the amiable and excessively reassuring manners of his kind. Like Choiseul before him, he hated England, but unlike Choiseul he also had little love for Austria. However, like the King, Vergennes loathed the idea of war and always hoped for peace, though his judgement was erratic. The future President of the United States of America, Mr Thomas Jefferson, when US ambassador to France, considered M de Vergennes a stimulating person ‘to do business with’, but incapable of understanding American institutions. ‘It is impossible to have a clearer, better organized head, but age has chilled his heart.’

Perhaps the most interesting appointment was Malesherbes, also in his fifties, who was made minister in charge of the royal household, much to the Queen’s irritation. This amiable and distinguished Parlementaire was a former President of the
Cour des Aides
who had defended the Parlement against Louis XV; he was also a celebrated liberal and friend to the
Philosophes
, the man whose tolerance as official censor had made possible the publication of the
Encyclopédie
. He was a character of Johnsonian proportions; a jolly, untidy figure in an old, snuff-stained brown suit, his wig askew, perpetually sucking a pipe and gesturing with a thick stick, whose hobbies were literature and botany. A keen reformer, Malesherbes would have liked France to have been given a constitution on the English model, although—as he would one day prove with his life—he was a most faithful servant of the Crown. His popularity made him a valuable ally for Turgot.

Within a year, largely through sacking useless officials, the Controller-General had reduced government expenditure by 66,200,000 livres (well over two and a half million pounds in contemporary English money). Unfortunately, his abandonment of controls on the grain trade sent wheat prices soaring and there were bread riots, even in Paris, popularly known as ‘The Flour War’. As he had predicted, he outraged the privileged classes, including the clergy, and the party of religion at court soon turned the Queen against him; she did her best to discredit the Controller-General with the King. None the less, Turgot clung grimly to office, and Louis continued to support him, though more and more doubtfully. In 1776 the Controller-General introduced his famous Six Edicts—his programme for reform. The opposition took particular exception to the proposed abolition of the
corvée
(the peasants’ duty work on the roads) and its replacement by a road tax on local landowners. Louis, rather surprisingly, forced the Parlement to register the edicts with the
lit de justice
.

But by now Marie Antoinette was really angry. Turgot had insisted on recalling one of her protégés from London—the Duc de Guisnes (of Mozart’s
Guisnes Concerto
)—where he was ambassador, on the grounds of incompetence. Turgot’s position was weakened still further when Malesherbes resigned. He then terrified the King with a scheme for a national assembly, following it with an extraordinarily tactless letter—‘Never forget Sire, that weakness put Charles I’s head on the block.’ He was dismissed in May 1776, after being Controller-General for only twenty months. Many historians believe that Turgot’s dismissal marked the final doom of the old monarchy.

Louis, in his dealings with Turgot, had eventually shown all his own worst qualities—a fear of unpopularity, and a slowness of thought which invariably grew into irresolution. Added to this was his pathological terror of being dominated by any one minister. Yet the King was thoroughly honest and kind-hearted, and still hoped to make his people love him by good government. In the twentieth century he would have been an excellent constitutional monarch.

None the less, whatever his vices or virtues, Louis XVI was undeniably an oddity. He indulged in orgies of gluttony, frequently preparing the meals himself and then gorging and swilling until he was carried almost insensible to his bed, emitting
‘un bruit très suspect’
. Certain disloyal courtiers called him ‘the fat pig’, while the naturalist Buffon, who saw him dining with his accustomed enthusiasm, was put in mind of a big monkey feeding at the zoo. One of the royal breakfasts consisted of four chops, a plump chicken, a thick slice of ham and six baked eggs, washed down by a bottle and a half of champagne; the same day he ate a gargantuan dinner. Indeed, the Austrian ambassador reported that the King’s return from hunting was followed by meals so enormous ‘that they deprive him of reason’. Plump even as a youth, he became inordinately fat (though in part this may have been due to glandular trouble.) Probably because of his hunting, his health did not suffer, apart from the occasional hangover, and he was famous for his strength; he could pick up a page standing on a heavy shovel and carry him round the room. The worst effects of the monarch’s gorging were his primitive humour (consisting of the simplest practical jokes), a tendency to foul language and an almost Bohemian slovenliness; the Swedish King, the elegant Gustav III, was received by Louis with hair uncombed and wearing a dressing-gown and odd shoes. It is only fair to add that he fasted rigorously throughout Lent.

Like so many of his dynasty, Louis XVI was never so happy as when working with tools. He enjoyed making clocks and locks; a smithy with two forges was attached to his library and a locksmith was in permanent attendance; he made a metal table which he gave to Vergennes. Mme de Campans says that the King’s hands were often filthy—on at least one occasion the Queen screamed at him for being so dirty (though he took daily baths). He had a telescope room at Versailles, equipped with the most modern instruments through which he scanned his visitors, together with model warships and even small James Watt steam engines. Masonry was another relaxation and he built several walls with his own hands. Nor did he disdain chopping wood. Sometimes he was almost frivolous, indulging in backgammon or going to the play—Molière was a particular favourite.

However, unlike almost all Bourbons, Louis XVI had small interest in patronizing the arts. Nor was he a builder. He was equally untypical in his intellectual curiosity. His library was filled with works in Latin, German and English (he began a translation of Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, which was later incorporated by Guizot into his own translation). He read Shakespeare, Fielding and Defoe—notably
Robinson Crusoe
—and glanced at most of the leading European newspapers and the English
Annual Register
—he was acquainted with all the more famous debates in the English Parliament. The King also owned many books on travel, science and geography and, in particular, history—especially naval and English. In fact he was very much a man of the Enlightenment. Unfortunately, he far preferred reading in his library to government business.

No wife could have been less suited to him than Queen Marie Antoinette. She had no intellectual interests whatsoever and her taste was inferior even to that of Mme du Barry (who had been sent to a convent for a dreadful, but mercifully brief, period of penance). Apart from ordering some good furniture from Riesener and Jacob, the Queen’s one essay in patronage was to make Paris learn to like the music of her old music-master, Gluck—and his
Iphigénie
in particular. Her chief joys were having her hair fantastically styled by her beloved coiffeur, Léonard, ordering extravagant if deceptively simple clothes from the great dressmaker Rose Bertin, and playing at being a dairymaid at her ‘hamlet’ next to the Petit Trianon (known as her ‘Little Vienna’), where she kept cows and goats with ribbons round their necks, milking them daily. She was also a compulsive gambler, playing all night and every night. Desperately frustrated, she found a certain relief in emotional friendships with young favourites like the delightful Princesse de Lamballe, a honey-blonde widow of eighteen, whom Mme de Campan described as ‘looking like spring peeping out from beneath sable and ermine’; and the beautiful but greedy Comtesse de Polignac, with whom Marie Antoinette was eternally arm-in-arm, and whose relations all sponged on her. There were undoubtedly sapphic undertones to these friendships. Soon the Queen’s allowance had to be doubled—partly because of vast sums lost at the gaming table or spent on diamonds, partly for pensions for her friends.

Marie Antoinette also flirted much too much, with men like the middle-aged roué, Baron de Besenval, who commanded the Swiss Guards, and the impertinent but amusing Duc de Lauzun, whom eventually she had to snub. Her profligate young brother-in-law, Charles of Artois, presided over her gay supper parties at the Petit Trianon and took her racing; there were rumours that Artois was her lover, and he was undoubtedly too familiar—he was actually seen to pinch her. (Their friendship cooled after her children were born, an indication that it was innocent, if indiscreet.) There were also rumours that she slept with the Duc de Coigny, the Swedish Count Fersen (Colonel of the Royal Swedish Regiment) and the Franco-Irishman, Count Edouard Dillon; these slanders were largely circulated by the Duc de Chartres (later Orléans) who bragged vilely that he had had to rebuff the Queen’s advances. Then there were stories that her bedroom was hung with diamond-studded tapestries, lit by a thousand candles, and had a bed with black satin sheets. Indeed, the poor woman was accused in countless filthy pamphlets of every known vice, including both Lesbian revels and Messalina-like orgies.

Within a few years Marie Antoinette was detested by almost all sections of society, who referred to her as ‘The Austrian’ and expressed deep pity for the King. She had made herself thoroughly unpopular with the nobility by her rudeness, her breezy simplifying of etiquette, and her favouritism and prejudice—throughout the reign she attacked her husband’s ministers for the most frivolous reasons. Nor did her jokes about Louis, whom she spoke of as ‘that poor fellow’, endear her; referring to his blacksmith’s forge, she once wrote that she had no desire ‘to play Venus to his Vulcan’. The alarmed Austrian ambassador reported to Vienna as early as 1776 that, ‘Each day fewer and fewer people come to Versailles and the situation will go from bad to worse if the Queen cannot make up her mind to conduct her court in a more sober and orderly fashion.’ Maria Theresa sent dreadful letters to her daughter. The Empress told ‘Madame my dear daughter’ that she was behaving like a Pompadour or a du Barry rather than a Queen, and that the news of her amusements and ridiculously affected hair-styles—‘like an actress’—made her mother tremble. Marie Antoinette’s lack of respect for the King was shocking. Furthermore, ‘It is rumoured that you do not pay your country’s noblemen the respect due to them and don’t even talk to them, but chatter instead with your young ladies and play all sorts of silly games.’

In 1777 the Queen’s brother, the Emperor Joseph II—a Viennese of the dour sort—visited France incognito to see just how bad things were. His considered view of his brother-in-law after meeting him was that Louis was ‘a little weak but no fool’, though curiously apathetic in mind and body. As for his sister, whom he reduced to tears, Joseph wrote grimly that she thought only of her pleasures and ‘fulfills neither the duties of a wife or a Queen’. It was all to no avail, and Marie Antoinette remained one of the monarchy’s greatest liabilities.

Nor were the rest of the Royal Family exactly an asset. Even
‘Mesdames Tantes’
were unpopular because of their bigotry. Horace Walpole saw them, and was as catty as only his sort of Englishman can be: ‘The Four Mesdames, who are clumsy, plump old wenches with a bad likeness to their father, stand in a bedchamber in a row, with black cloaks and knitting bags, looking good humoured, not knowing what to say, and wriggling as if they wanted to make water.’

Monsieur (Provence) was sensible enough, but he was unattractive in appearance and had an icily cold manner. Artois was worst of all, disastrously fond of wine, women and song, and gambling too—his debts were astronomical, twenty-one million livres by 1781, much to the fury of the taxpayers. Strikingly handsome, charming when he felt like it, he was often drunk and violently rude. One of his boon companions was the awful Chartres.

Philippe, Duc d’Orléans (known as Duc de Chartres until he became Orléans on his father’s death in 1785) was considered a member of the Royal Family, though privately he saw himself as head of a rival dynasty, rather than a junior Prince of the Blood. Like so many of his line, the Duke was a byword for debauchery. Although smaller and older—he had been born in 1747—and beautifully dressed, he resembled King Louis in appearance, but his face was blotched purple from hard drinking and ravaged by the pox. He led a life of the utmost futility, drinking, whoring and gambling, proud of his skill at card tricks and throwing dice—on one occasion he is said to have offered to run stark naked through Paris for a bet. Like some of Balzac’s villains, Orléans combined avarice with debauchery. When his losses at the gaming-table grew out of hand, he more than recouped them by building three arcades of shops round the gardens of the Palais Royal, which he turned into a public pleasure park; the arcades were soon filled with cafés, restaurants, hairdressers and jewellers’ shops, and also casinos and smart brothels. He was already enormously rich, and the venture made him King of Paris, with the Palais Royal for his Versailles. The debauched little Duke hated his cousins, but was too ineffectual to do them much damage.

In 1776 Jacques Necker, a brilliant Swiss banker and writer on economics, was appointed ‘Director of Finances’. (In practice he was Controller-General in everything but name, but it was considered unfitting that so prestigious a title should be given to a foreigner and Protestant.) A self-made man who had bought a French title, Necker was a plump, pot-bellied, yellow-faced bourgeois with awkward, oily manners, but extremely vain and socially ambitious. Through his wife’s somewhat louche salon and his promiscuous blue-stocking daughter (the future Mme de Staël), he had made many useful friends whom he had no wish to upset by introducing new taxes. Although as a
Philosophe
Necker introduced a number of minor reforms—he abolished 2,000 minor court posts—he was hardly another Turgot. In any case, the country’s finances were soon completely out of control because of French intervention in the American Revolution; as Turgot had predicted, France was ruined from the moment the first shot was fired. Without war, Necker might have preserved some semblance of solvency—as it was, faced by impossible demands for money, all he did was borrow long-term loans at ruinous interest and then produce a reassuring booklet on the national finances, the
Compte rendu au Roi
; in fact, the
Compte rendu
was a massive cooking of the books.