Marie Antoinette

Well! In a marathon late-night session I finally finished Stefan Zweig’s famous biography of Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman. As his post-colonic suggests, Zweig’s primary thesis is that the Queen was a thoroughly mediocre woman made great by historical events. He situates his biography in between the über-royalist conception of Antoinette as a wonderful martyred saint and the über-revolutionary portrait of her as basically a retarded prostitute. Zweig is like “the coolest thing about Marie Antoinette was how totally normal she was.” However, with the literary flourish that has gotten him in trouble in terms of whether or not it’s really fair of him to call this book a “biography” rather than, say, “historical fiction” (see below), Zweig doesn’t remain content with this mediocrity thesis–in the interests of narrative melodrama, he has to turn the suffering Queen into the most noble, the most courageous, the most steadfast, and even the most brilliantly articulate of people (well, women (also more on this later)) by the end of her sordid tale, and that stuff doesn’t exactly gibe with his earlier insistence on the fact that she couldn’t read or write, for example (seems highly dubious to me but this is not my area of specialty).

Anyway, it’s true that Antoinette the human person was not necessarily that interesting. She didn’t have interesting thoughts or ideas, she didn’t behave in an interesting way, except insofar as she was insanely profligate to such a degree that one can’t help but maintain a sort of US Weekly-style sense of titillation, like when you read about Paris Hilton’s boyfriend paying a homeless man $5 to pour a coke on his own head. She wasn’t a Voltaire or a Desmoulins or somebody who rode a rocket ship to the moon. She was a rich kid who got sold off to another rich kid in the interests of the State; she didn’t really do much of anything of note for like 25 years; then she accidentally became the symbol of everything the French Revolution stood against, pretty much just because she was a woman and a foreigner and liked to do her hair fancy. What happened to her was certainly unfair in terms of the life of this one human person, who after all had almost no actual power in terms of influencing affairs of state and yet had to suffer some really astounding cruelties, for example hearing her 7 year old son testify in court that she had raped him, and of course getting carted to the guillotine with people throwing garbage at her; on the other hand it’s difficult to give much of a personal shit about the fall of the ancien régime, which was comprised of such major league assholes the horrible decision-making skills of whom created the essential problem to begin with. Indeed Zweig makes much of one of my favorite Famous Quotes of this era, which Louis XV said when contemplating his own death: “apres moi, le déluge.” What kind of a jackass says something like that, seriously. You are supposed to be the safeguard of like 20 million people, you dillweed! Please can you stop eating and fucking for ONE SECOND.

Zweig wrote this biography in 1933 and I believe most people consider it basically a pack of lies, delightfully rendered. He makes stuff up wholesale; he elaborates, he speculates, he states things as fact that couldn’t possibly be true. There are of course no footnotes, because it was 1933, so you’re just as likely to get a quotation from an actual historical document (supposedly) as you are to get a quotation Zweig made up in the interests of narrative drama. For example, he’s constantly describing these people in great physical detail–how they moved, how their eyes looked when certain things happened, how there was something cold about Marie Antoinette’s expression, how she was only really beautiful when in motion. I suppose some of this is fair game and can be interpreted in various portraits or I guess in descriptions people wrote in letters or diaries, but he takes it SO FAR, to the point where you are wondering where is this amazing time machine you must have used, Stefan Zweig, and can I borrow it? I want to meet this conniving Madame de Polignac whose raven locks and false air of intimacy ensnared the young queen into lesbian sexcapades! etc.

This tendency to elaborate or even just make stuff up out of whole cloth gets worse as the book goes on, I believe, although again it’s not like I have visited the requisite archives and checked everything. I only note that he contradicts himself within his own book. For example, Marie Antoinette supposedly had this love affair with Count Fersen, a Swedish dude who was nice to her. He orchestrated the fatally flawed Flight to Varennes, etc. It seems that they probably did have some sort of an affair, but from what I can tell no one is sure how extensive it was, and there’s not a ton of documentation. So Zweig himself SAYS THIS in the early pages of the book–he says there is no documentation of the affair because Fersen’s heirs studiously erased or destroyed tons of his letters and journals. Zweig takes these acts as an admission of guilt–why would they destroy the correspondence if it didn’t comprise passionate love letters to the Queen, etc.?–and goes on to basically just novelize what he hopes must have been true about the pair, based on “human nature,” to which he appeals often. He says there is only one letter that escaped destruction, and that in it the Queen calls Fersen “most beloved of men.” That’s it, according to Zweig (it’s enough for him–his account of their profoundly sexual lovemaking goes on and on). But then, several hundred pages later, he’s suddenly quoting liberally from Fersen’s journal and from letters the Queen wrote to him from prison, in which their love is explicitly stated again and again. The Queen sends Fersen an impression in wax she makes of a ring she had engraved with his coat of arms; Fersen travels back to France in disguise and bribes her jailers so he can spend one last tragic night with her while the King keeps respectfully away; Zweig quotes from journal entries and gives their dates and everything–on June 20th (the anniversary of the Flight to Varennes) Fersen wrote in his diary “all joy is effaced, if only I could have died by her side, etc. etc.” So I’m confused!!! I mean, I agree with Zweig that these people were humans, and indeed if Fersen and the Queen were desperately in love, it does seem likely that on the anniversary of the occasion on which he came so close to saving her but ultimately failed he might reflect on this in his diary, and I know that all written history is in some sense storytelling, but still, you can’t just make shit up. I wish I were friends with the people at the BnF so I could go ask them for help, because I’m pretty sure that’s the only way this question can be answered. Cursory searches of scholarly article databases has yielded nothing, although to be fair I spent like 10 minutes only. Where the F are Count Fersen’s journals archived, if they even exist at all? Man, whenever you find yourself complaining about the fetishization of citation currently swamping contemporary scholarship, just remember how frustrating it is to not be able to track down proof that Count Fersen gave Marie Antoinette her first orgasm and thus turned her, at last, into a Real Woman (not my words)

This leads us to all the delicious Freudian stuff. Zweig was friends with Freud, I think, and it shows. Crazy old perverted 1930s Austrian men! His psychological profiles of all the main actors in this drama are so delightful. Mirabeau had sex with not one but TWO prostitutes the very day he died–such monstrous virility! I love this stuff. Lets dig in:

So, as everyone knows, there were in reality some really weird sexual problems manifested in the royal marriage. Louis XVI and Antoinette were married when they were 15 or 16, and then everyone waited with bated breath for them to produce an heir to the throne. This is how hereditary monarchy works, so it’s understandable that everyone was completely obsessed with the royal pair’s sex life. And, due to the peculiar nature of court etiquette in France–which was much more elaborate and bizarre than that of other European courts due to certain rituals instituted by Louis XIV in the brilliant consolidation of absolutism, but that is seriously a story for another time–there were roughly one million people who had intimate knowledge of what went on between the two. And when I say “intimate,” I mean like people were literally in the bedroom at all times, essentially, and smelling the sheets and seeing the Queen naked and knowing the exact moment when she started menstruating, etc. There was a special noblewoman for every conceivable task–one to hand the Queen her nightgown, one to fetch the chamber pot, one to hand her the portfolio of dress designs for her to choose her day’s wardrobe from, etc. etc. And all these people gossiped horribly and were basically awful human beings. So EVERYBODY IN FRANCE knew that the two weren’t having sex. Why weren’t they????

This is admittedly fascinating, no lie. I won’t pretend it’s not. Why weren’t they having sex? They knew they were supposed to. They were desperate to produce an heir. Even if they’d loathed one another–as surely countless royal marriages have done in the past–they still would have done it, so what was the problem? In Antoinette’s letters to her mother she apparently (again, this is Zweig, so who knows) speaks of “the little difficulty” or she’ll say “things seemed like they went better last night” etc. At first everyone–her mother (Maria Theresa, the Empress of Austria), the various envoys sent between them, various ambassadors, court assholes–assumed it was due to Antoinette’s inexperience. Her mom constantly writes to her about how to be seductive, how not to pressure him, how to be available at all times. Stop staying up all night at the poker table, my daughter! Go warm your husband’s bed! But Antoinette is like “But it’s so BORRRRRING” and her mom is like “girl quit that talk, how dare you! I didn’t sell you to Louis XV so you could gamble millions of francs away with your reprobate brothers-in-law! And what’s this I hear about your hairstyle getting so tall that carpenters had to raise all the doorways in the palace, are you crazy?” etc.

Then after awhile people start realizing it can’t just be Antoinette’s problem and that something must be wrong with the King. The King is, admittedly, kind of an idiot, this seems sort of incontrovertible. He’s boring and slow and never makes decisions and lets people walk all over him and all he cares about is hunting and building locks in his smithy (the Freudian significance of which does not go unnoticed by anybody in the world, rest assured. A locksmith who couldn’t get his “key” into the most important “lock” of all! LOL). He’s such a dullard that even when for example the women march on Versailles and take him hostage, all he writes in his diary for that night (according to Zweig, which means it’s probably not true) is that his hunting was “interrupted by events.” I’ll say!

So maybe the King doesn’t understand how babies get made?? People make decorous interventions and, presumably, leave the 18th century equivalent of “WHERE DID I COME FROM” and “OUR BODIES OURSELVES” lying around. After awhile, Maria Theresa sends her son–Antoinette’s brother–to Paris to try to make sense of this issue. It’s now been FIVE YEARS since the marriage and not only is there no pregnancy but they literally haven’t had sex. Emperor Josef takes Louis aside and is like “what’s going on here son” and Louis says “there’s something wrong with my penis,” which is a big surprise to Josef, who was prepared to use diagrams and manly jocularity to explain to the King how to do his duty (now I’m the one embroidering–I’m sure there were no diagrams involved. Imagine an 18th century diagram of how conception happens! I’m sure they exist) but who was now instead confronted with something so weird no one had even speculated about it before. We apparently have this information in a letter from the Spanish ambassador–Louis had some sort of weird thing where his foreskin was attached somewhere awkward, and it meant he couldn’t get erections. Not his fault!!! So then the surgeon is called, and the surgeon is like “I can fix that for you, your majesty,” but Louis waits another TWO YEARS to get it dealt with, which Zweig says is due to his characteristic unmanly indecisiveness but I think we can all agree that 18th century penis surgery does not sound that awesome.

Finally he gets the surgery, all is well, and he is able to finally mount his wife. All this is well and good, but now lets examine how Zweig discusses these events:

Louis was not virile enough to love; his heart was too cold. On the other hand, Marie Antoinette’s liking for her husband was tinged too much with compassion, kindly consideration, and at times even condescension, was too lukewarm a mixture of these multifarious ingredients, to be worthy of the name of love. As far as the crudities of bodily intercourse were concerned, from a sense of duty and for reasons of State this highly strung and sensitive woman had to give herself to her husband; but it would be absurd to suppose that so easygoing and sluggish a fellow could have aroused and then gratified erotic tension in a woman of brisk and lively disposition.

and

The husband to whose embraces she had, for reasons of State, been assigned, did not, during these seven years of pseudomarriage, leave her in a condition of untouched and untroubled chastity; again and again, for the space of two thousand nights, awkwardly and fruitlessly he endeavoured to take possession of her youthful body. Year after year her sexual passions were fruitlessly stimulated in this unsatisfying, shameful, and degrading way, without a single act of complete intercourse. One need hardly be a neurologist or a sexologist to recognize that her superlative liveliness, her persistent and unavailing search for new satisfactions, her fickle pursuit of one pleasure after another, were typical outcomes of unceasing sexual stimulation by a husband who was unable to provide her with adequate gratification. Because she had never been stirred to the depths and then profoundly satisfied, this wife who was not really a wife after seven years of married existence craved for an atmosphere of perpetual movement and unrest.

Zweig posits that the “affair of the alcove,” as he calls it, is what basically led to the French Revolution. I actually found this kind of compelling, because I am a feminist and I think misogyny is at the root of all problems (exaggeration). So here we have an uneasy populace who is starving to death, and then they are given a new young Queen who comes from another country. She doesn’t do anything for them–she doesn’t go on visits to shake hands with them, etc., she doesn’t acknowledge them in any way–and meanwhile word is getting out into the rest of the country about how much money she’s spending on things like hairdressers and shoes, and turning the palace next to Versailles into a fake peasant village, complete with actual peasants milking glossily-brushed and beribboned cows into porcelain vases and walking snowy-white sheep out into meadows with silk ribbons around their necks–Bucolic Poor Person Disneyland. Imagine Marie Antoinette standing on the riverbank (of a fake river, piped in from miles away at great expense) holding a little dog, delightedly watching real peasant women pretend to wash clothes for her pleasure. Um. So that’s bad enough, BUT THEN!!!!! Everyone knows the King is impotent and the royal couple have not had sex. What does a woman do when she is frustrated sexually? She has sex outside of her marriage of course! What does that make her? A WHORE. Oh also a lesbian. So the known fact of the King’s impotence led the people to automatically decide the Queen was a terrible foreign prostitute sent to befuddle and cuckold their monarch and suck their country dry. Dreadful pamphlets began circulating.

I just went and read a Terry Castle article about Antoinette and she discusses how the charge of lesbianism was even worse than that of whoredom (is that a noun? Jeez). There are all these hateful drawings and engravings of the Queen fingering her ladies in waiting and such, and Castle points out that the lesbian stuff actually went so far as to disgust and alienate potential allies, quoting from Hester Thrale Piozzi in 1789: “The queen of France is at the Head of a Set of Monsters call’d by each other Sapphists, who boast her example; and deserve to be thrown with the He Demons that haunt each other likewise, into Mount Vesuvius.” Castle also points out that the famously horrific death of the Princess de Lamballe–the Queen’s special friend and one of the primary focuses of the homophobic rage directed at the monarchy–seems to serve as evidence that homophobia was more damaging to Antoinette than many of the other cultural themes of the Revolution: the crowd stripped de Lamballe, murdered her, tore her corpse apart, and then carried her head on a pike to where Antoinette was imprisoned, with the goal of forcing her to kiss it on the lips.

Zweig matches this historical misogyny with his own, though. Every woman who ever does Antoinette a bad turn is described as being a prostitute. And I mean literally–he says Madame du Barry was a “street walker” before becoming the King’s favorite mistress. Now, maybe I am a fool, but I find that VERY hard to believe. The wife of a nobleman was a streetwalker? And even if she was, at what point was Louis XV just trotting down some Parisian side alley, such that he could encounter her? He could (and did, I assume) have the best whores in France shipped directly to his bedroom! I highly doubt that La du Barry was “advertising her wares” in the red light district or whatever. So this is annoying, but I’m willing to give him a pass because du Barry slept with the king for money and favors, thus in some sense prostituted herself blah blah (although, not like you had much of a choice if a King wanted to have sex with you, amirite, ladies of the court of Henry VIII?). Okay fair enough. But Zweig doesn’t just stop at actual mistresses or fallen women–he characterizes EVERYBODY as a prostitute. Oh, the little flower-seller who was elected to speak to the King during the march on Versailles? She “sold flowers (and probably something more) to the habitués of the Palais Royal,” according to Zweig. Probably, huh? Yeah that’s good stuff.

It’s hard to tell where he stands, too, which is fine with me but still confusing. Sometimes it seems like he can not heap enough scorn on “the people,” the revolution, the concept of democracy, etc. Other times he seems utterly disgusted with the Bourbon monarchy and with monarchy in general. After awhile I realized that his allegiances do not go along conventional lines–he’s not a republican or a royalist, he’s not even thinking about that stuff. I submit that Zweig approves of people he finds sufficiently manly (including women who behave enough like men), and disapproves of people he finds unmanly. A man (or woman) is manly if he is brave, resolute, honorable, and maintains his dignity while being guillotined or otherwise threatened (thus Zweig ultimately approves of Antoinette, for example, even calling her supposed final letter before her beheading “almost virile”), and a man is unmanly if he ever changes his mind, behaves in a cowardly fashion, is indecisive, or does not have success with wooing women. Thus Zweig pities but ultimately does not approve of Louis XVI. To be fair, Louis XVI would be a hard man to approve of under really any circumstances. But anyway, according to this rubric Zweig is able to applaud both Marie Antoinette and Robespierre, for example–which somewhat boggles the mind–because both are resolute and courageous (he remains silent on the fact that Robespierre tried to commit suicide before the Convention was able to guillotine him, which I believe would fall under the “cowardly” heading in Zweig’s morality index but maybe I am not grasping all the nuances).

I am poking fun at this manner of defining who is Good and Bad in history, but at the same time it’s not like it’s any more useful to be like REVOLUTION GOOD, KING BAD, because, you know, the revolutionaries did a lot of awful shit (mass drowning of counter-revolutionaries in the Vendée; chopping thousands of people’s heads off for no real reason; implementing surveillance and secret police and a culture of terror ON PURPOSE; generally doing a really bad job of actually governing and making sure people had enough to eat; not to mention, you know, Napoleon trying to becoming the King of the entire Western World by force) and set us on the path toward neoliberal capitalism or whatever, and I’m sure there have been good kings, whatever that means. Anyway, file under: me no know.

Still, ’tis a riveting tale, boldly told. I couldn’t put it down. Zweig is an incredibly gifted writer (or else his translators are, who can tell–but he was once the most famous writer in all the world so I have to assume it’s not just a Baudelarian whitewashing job done by translators). It’s a literary biography, meaning much of it is basically untrue, but also meaning it is super compelling. There are all manner of wonderful details, for example during the aborted Flight to Varennes, when members of the National Assembly decide to ride back to Paris in the carriage with the humiliated royal family, and are then so delighted because they get to watch the little prince pee into a chamber pot, proving he’s just like regular people. Did that really happen? Who knows! But it’s a fun story. And some of his flights of fancy are perfectly fine with me, so long as they don’t involve making up historical events. Take, for example, his description of Versailles:

Down to our own day, Versailles seems the most magnificent, the most challenging gesture of autocracy. Without obvious reason, in a flat piece of country a few miles west of the capital, there stands on an artificial mound a huge palace looking down through hundreds of windows upon artificial water-ways and artificially designed gardens, forth into vacancy. There is no river to promote traffic and intercourse; the place is not a junctino of important roads or railways. A chance product, the petrified caprice ofa great ruler, this palace flaunts its unmeaning splendour before our astonished eyes. That is what Louis XIV, inflamed with Caesarean ambition, wanted! Versailles was to be a shining altar set up that it might minister to his overweening vanity, might foster his trend towards self-idolization. A convinced autocrat, dictatorial by temperament, he had victoriously imposed his will to unity upon a disintegrated land: prescribing order for his realm; a code of morals for society; etiquette for his court; unity for the faith;a nd purity for the French tongue. This will to unity had radiated from his person, and therefore all resplendence was to be consecrated in his person. ‘L’état c’est moi.’ I am the centre of France; I am the navel of the world.

Damn!

His description of the royal family’s final days is pretty harrowing, as indeed I’m sure it was to actually live them. It truly must be no picnic to sit in prison waiting and waiting and waiting for people to finally tell you they’ve decided to chop your head off after first driving you around Paris for 3 hours so people can spit on you and call you a lesbian and that asshole David can make a rude sketch of you. And the whole time you’re thinking “surely my brother, the Emperor of Austria, will save me!” but years go by and nothing happens, and unbeknownst to you your brother is just stabbing a game hen with a knife and saying “oh dear, poor Antoinette, what a shame, well, that’s how it goes.” Or you’re thinking “surely my husband’s own brothers will intervene!” and unbeknownst to you they are actually over in Prussia scheming to take your throne before your body is even cold. Brutal! And then your children are taken away from you–and not just the stupid daughter, but the SON! How dare they! The son you had to give birth to in front of 50 onlookers in a stuffy bedchamber!

Finally you’re the only one left and they come to get you and they’re like “at last, Madame le Prostitute, your time has come, LOL” and you get your hair chopped off and your hands tied behind your back and you have to sit in the open cart (which, Zweig does this wonderful thing where he points out that within mere months this very same cart will contain every person who has dogged the Queen to her death this whole time, because the revolution eats its children etc.) and all the fishwives (revolutionary historians’ obsession with fishwives remains a hilarious mystery to me) are throwing fish skeletons at you and then you walk up the steps of the scaffold and get your head chopped off in front of thousands of jeering people. That’s no walk in the park.

Zweig closes with this totally awesome description of the statue of liberty that had recently been erected to replace the statue of Louis XV in the newly-named Place de la Révolution where the guillotine stood (now called the Place de la Concorde, I think–I’ve been there, and there’s just the teeny-tiniest of plaques acknowledging that this was where the royal family were beheaded. It’s admittedly kind of embarrassing, like what if in Washington D.C. there was a spot where we’d decapitated the tyrant King George? AWKWARD):

Near by, much taller than the gateway of death, towered the huge statue of liberty upon the pedestal which once had borne the monument of Louis XV. A seated figure, that of the unapproachable deity, her head crowned by the Phrygian cap, and the sword of justice in her hand; she sat there, petrified, the Goddess of Liberty, dreaming, dreaming. Her white eyes were staring across the restless crowd and across the ‘humane-killer’ into distances invisible to human eyes. She did not see human beings at all, neither their life nor their death–this incomprehensible and eternally beloved goddess with the dreaming eyes of stone. She did not hear the voices of those who appealed to her; she did not notice the garlands that were laid upon her stony knees; she did not see the blood that drenched the earth beneath her feet. An everlasting ideal, an alien among human beings, she sat mutely staring into the distant void, contemplating her invisible goal. She neither asked nor knew what deeds were being done in her name.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

FINIS