LOST KING OF FRANCE EPUB ED EB

Deborah Cadbury

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780007395002
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

'This is history as it should be. It is stunningly written, I could not put it down. This is the best account of the French Revolution I have ever read.' Alison Weir, author of 'Henry VIII, King and Court'

The fascinating, moving story of the brief life and many possible deaths of Louis XVII, son of Marie-Antoinette.

Louis-Charles Bourbon enjoyed a charmed early childhood in the gilded palace of Versailles. At the age of four, he became the Dauphin, heir to the most powerful throne in Europe. Yet within five years, he was to lose everything.

Drawn into the horror of the French Revolution, his family was incarcerated. Two years later, following the brutal execution of both his parents, the Revolutionary leaders declared Louis XVII was dead. No grave was dug, no monument built to mark his passing.

Immediately, rumours spread that the Prince had, in fact, escaped from prison and was still alive. Others believed that he had been murdered, his heart cut out and preserved as a relic. In time, his older sister, Marie-Therese, who survived the Revolution, was approached by countless 'brothers' who claimed not only his name, but also his inheritance. Several 'Princes' were plausible, but which, if any, was the real Louis-Charles?

Deborah Cadbury's 'The Lost King of France' is a moving and dramatic story which conclusively reveals the identity of the young prince who was lost in the tower.

Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.

PART ONE

1

‘THE FINEST KINGDOM IN EUROPE’

Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract (1762)

On Saturday 21 April 1770, Archduchess Maria-Antonia of Austria left her home, the imperial palace of Hofburg in Vienna, for ever and embarked on the long journey to France. On departure, in the courtyard in front of the palace, the royal entourage assembled. Two grand berlines lavishly upholstered in blue and crimson velvet and decorated with fine embroidery had been provided by the French ambassador to take Maria-Antonia to Paris. These were to be conveyed in a cavalcade of almost fifty carriages, each to be drawn by six horses and an array of guards and outriders. The whole of the Austrian court, in all its silken and bejewelled finery, attended this auspicious event. Maria-Antonia, the youngest daughter of the distinguished Empress Maria-Theresa and Emperor Franz I, was to marry the future king of France and, it was hoped, consolidate Austria’s troubled relationship with France.

Maria-Antonia was slightly built, with all the attractiveness of youth. ‘She has a most graceful figure; holds herself well; and if, as may be hoped, she grows a little taller, she will possess every good quality one could wish for in a great princess,’ wrote her tutor, the Abbé Jacques de Vermond, adding, ‘her heart and character are both excellent’. Maria-Antonia had large blue eyes, reddish blonde hair and a good complexion; many even considered her a beauty. The ageing French king, Louis XV, eagerly enquiring about the prospective Austrian bride for his grandson, was told by officials that she had ‘a charming face and beautiful eyes’. She had, however, inherited the Habsburg projecting lower lip and prominent brow, which prompted her mother, in preparations for the event, to bring a coiffeur from France to arrange her hair to soften the line of her forehead.

Maria-Antonia, the subject of all this detailed scrutiny, had had her future determined when she was thirteen. ‘Others make war but thou, O happy Austria, makest marriages,’ was a family motto. Her mother, the Empress Maria-Theresa, who was widely considered to be the best queen in Europe since Elizabeth I of England, ruled the Habsburg empire. Her territories encompassed most of central Europe, reaching to parts of Romania in the east, regions of Germany in the north, south to Lombardy and Tuscany in Italy and west to the Austrian Netherlands, now Belgium. Some of this success was due to a series of strategic marriages, which were an important part of royal diplomacy. Maria-Antonia was the youngest of sixteen children and several of her older sisters had already taken part in Austrian foreign policy. One sister was married to the governor general of the Austrian Netherlands, another became the Duchess of Parma, and a third, Maria-Antonia’s favourite sister, Maria Carolina, had become the queen of Naples – a role that at first she deplored. ‘The suffering is true martyrdom,’ Maria Carolina wrote home, ‘made worse by being expected to look happy … I pity Antonia who has yet to suffer it.’

For the Empress Maria-Theresa, eclipsing all these marriages was the prospect of an alliance with the French. France was seen as the richest and most powerful state in Europe, and, with twenty-five million people, was also the largest. Yet France had been Austria’s enemy for over two hundred years. For many, a permanent alliance between the two former long-standing enemies seemed out of the question, even potentially dangerous. However, the empress was determined to secure a match between her youngest daughter and the Dauphin of France. Such an important marriage would seal a political alliance and enable the two countries to work as allies against the growing Prussian influence.

Despite the exciting prospects that lay ahead, Maria-Antonia’s departure from her home, and her mother in particular, was still an ordeal, according to one witness, Joseph Weber, the son of her former nurse.

‘The young Maria-Antonia burst into tears and the spectators, touched by the sight, shared the cruel sufferings of mother and daughter. Maria-Theresa … took her into her arms and hugged her … ‘Adieu, my dear daughter; a great distance is going to separate us, but be just, be humane and imbued with a sense of the duties of your rank and I will always be proud of the regrets which I shall always feel … Do so much good to the people of France that they will be able to say that I have sent them an angel.’

As her carriage departed, Maria-Antonia, ‘her face bathed with tears, covered her eyes now with a handkerchief, now with her hands, and put her head out of the window again and again, to see once more the palace of her fathers to which she would never return’. All she had to represent her future was a miniature portrait of her future husband, Louis-Auguste, the Dauphin.

Her magnificent cortège travelled for a week through Austria and Bavaria until finally they reached the frontier with France, on the banks of the River Rhine near Kehl. On an island in the middle of the river, Maria-Antonia had to undergo a ceremony in which she was symbolically stripped of her Austrian roots and was then reborn, robed in French attire. A magnificent wooden pavilion, over a hundred feet long, had been constructed, divided into two main sections. On one side were the courtiers from Vienna and on the other those from France. Once the formal ceremonies were completed the door to the French side was opened, and the Dauphin’s future bride had to make her entrance into the French court, no longer Maria-Antonia but Marie-Antoinette. As she realised that the door to the Austrian side had closed behind her on all those familiar faces, she was overwhelmed, and ‘rushed’ into the French side ‘with tears in her eyes’.

As she continued her journey into France she received a rapturous welcome. Every kind of extravagant preparation had been made to honour the young princess. There were displays of all kinds – fireworks, dances, theatre – great triumphal arches built, petals strewn before her feet, floating gardens on the river beneath her window, fountains flowing with wine, endless enthusiastic crowds, cheer upon cheer. If she had left the Austrian court in tears, her slow progress through France to such approbation could only fill her with every possible hope.

By 14 May she arrived at Compiègne, some forty miles north-east of Paris, where she was to meet her future husband, Louis-Auguste. By now well briefed on etiquette by her new advisor, the eminent Comtesse de Noailles, Marie-Antoinette stepped from her carriage and sank into a deep curtsy before the king. Louis XV was still a handsome man, whose regal presence eclipsed that of the shy and somewhat overweight sixteen-year-old standing next to him. If she was disappointed by her first impressions of her future husband, there is no record of it. Others, however, have left a less than favourable account. ‘Nature seems to have denied everything to Monsieur le Dauphin,’ Maria-Theresa’s ambassador in France had reported, somewhat harshly. ‘In his bearing and words, the prince displays a very limited amount of sense, great plainness and no sensitivity.’ Indeed, the tall, ungainly youth was more than a little awkward with his prospective bride. When Marie-Antoinette politely kissed him he seemed unsure of himself and promptly moved away.

It took twenty-three days from leaving the Hofburg in Vienna to reach Versailles on 16 May 1770. As the cavalcade of carriages turned into the drive that sunny morning the vast scale of the magnificent chateau came into view. Once the dream of the Sun-King, Louis XIV, who had transformed it from a hunting lodge to a sumptuous estate and symbol of royal power, it created an immediate impression of classical grandeur, ionic columns, arched windows and balustrades receding into the distance as far as the eye could see. The ornamental façade of the main block alone, in brick and honey-coloured stone, stretched over a third of a mile. This was the administrative centre of Europe’s most powerful state, nothing less than a town for up to ten thousand people: the royal family and their entourage, several thousand courtiers and their servants, the King’s Household Troops, Swiss Guards, Musketeers, Gendarmes and countless other staff and visitors.

Marie-Antoinette was taken to the ground-floor apartments where her ladies-in-waiting were to get her ready for her wedding. Nothing can have prepared the princess for the lavishness of the palace; the Hofburg in Austria was modest by comparison. The reception rooms were of an unbelievable richness and elegance, and the draped and canopied beds of the royal apartments had more in common with Cleopatra’s silken barge than the planks and straw of the common lot. Then there were the endless mirrored panels of the vast Galerie des Glaces where courtiers were assembling to greet her. This famous Hall of Mirrors was the talk of Europe, with its four hundred thousand reflected candles, gold and more gold, the sparkle of diamonds and the finest crystal – and, beyond the tall western windows, the perfect view with its enchanted blue distance held for ever in mirrors. It could not fail to seduce the senses and beguile the emperor’s daughter as to her assured prospects at Versailles.

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, decl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Sources
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Praise
• Copyright
• About the Publisher