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T H E Q U E S T I O N O F M A R I E - A N T O I N E T T E :T H E Q U E E N A N D P U B L I C O P I N I O N

B E F O R E T H E R E V O L U T I O N

V I V I A N R . G R U D E R *

Abstract —Did scandalous representations of Marie-Antoinette help to bring on theRevolution? This old and new question is examined in this article. The number and circu-lation of writings, talk and imagery before 1789 were less than historians assume. Scandal-mongering had largely aristocratic origins, and was promoted by money-hungry writers notalways successful. Its range was predominantly in Versailles and Paris, and its resonanceamong provincials was limited. Public response was ambiguous, not just unquestionedacceptance but also scepticism and criticism, along with praise for the queen. Scandalousdiatribes were intricately related to political developments. Beginning in 1787 mounting

opposition to royal policies triggered venomous attacks against Marie-Antoinette which intensified in 1789 and later. Scandal-mongering against the queen did not undermine theregime, but opposition to Bourbon policy and action fomented scandalous attacks as an armof combat.

‘Did she, or didn’t she?’ That is the question posed about Marie-Antoinette.

Did she, or more exactly did the scandalous even pornographic libels againsther, ignite the French public and contribute to bringing on the Revolution?

What was once the fare of popular history has come to nurture scholarly history.

Renewed interest in Marie-Antoinette initially arose from the growing

importance of feminist history. Historians turned to examine not the actual roleof the queen, but the representations of the queen in contemporary writings

and imagery. Such were the contributions of Lynn Hunt, Chantal Thomas,

& Oxford University Press 2002 French History, Vol. 16 No. 3, pp. 269–298

* The author is Professor Emerita of History, Queens College, City University of New York. Shemay be contacted via email at [email protected]. This is an expanded version of a portion of anarticle, ‘Whither revisionism? Political perspectives on the ancien regime’, French Historical Studies, 20 (1997), 254–71. The author expresses gratitude to PSC-CUNY of the City University of New York for financial assistance in carrying out research for this article.



Sarah Maza and also Jacques Revel.1 Hunt, Thomas and Revel focus on repre-sentations of the queen during the period of the Revolution, when a plethora of

writings and illustrations depicted her as a lascivious, sex-craved nympho-

maniac and lesbian, while Maza turned to the years before the Revolution, tothe portrayals of a queen implicated if not actually believed to be guilty in the

‘diamond necklace affair’ of 1785–6. Hunt and Maza both contribute to the

view that these depictions expressed the hostility to the queen as the ‘public woman’ who stepped beyond the bounds assigned to the female in the

eighteenth century and used her influence and power excessively, even

nefariously, resulting in her demonization. ‘Male chauvinism’ with a revenge, we may say. One problem that arises from these writings is the imprecision or

fluidity of historical chronology and context. While Hunt and Revel clearly

write on the period from 1789 on, Thomas does not locate the writings sheexamines in a precise time even though they are from the Revolutionary years.Readers, autonomous agents who contribute their own interpretation to the

words of authors, as we now recognize, then transfer the depiction of the

queen in writings during the Revolution to the years before the Revolution.

Gary Kates, reviewing books on the years before and after 1789, draws a

conclusion that he applies to both periods: ‘Thanks to the scholarship of Chantal Thomas and Lynn Hunt, we know that dozens of obscene pamphlets

appeared during this period alleging that the queen had made a brothel of the

court through constant sexual intrigues and perverse affairs.’2 In the absence of

an exact linkage between the writings, as well as talk and illustrations, and thetime and circumstances of their appearance, the long-held fantasies of popular history are given a scholarly veneer.

An even more weighty contribution to what may be called the ‘porno-

graphic’ interpretation of the French Revolution comes from the many writings

of Robert Darnton, especially The literary underground of the Old Regime.

270 T H E Q U E S T I O N O F M A R I E - A N T O I N E T T E

1 L. Hunt, ‘The political psychology of revolutionary caricatures’, in French caricature and the French Revolution, 1789–1799 (Los Angeles, Calif., 1988), pp. 33–40; idem, ‘The many bodies of

Marie-Antoinette: political pornography and the problem of the feminine in the French Revolution’,in Eroticism and the body politic , ed. L. Hunt (Baltimore, Md, 1991), pp. 108–130; idem, The family romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), ch. 4; and idem, ‘Pornography and the French Revolution’, in The invention of pornography, obscenity and the origins of modernity, 1500–1800, ed. L. Hunt (New York, 1993), pp. 301–40; C. Thomas, La reine sce le rate, Marie-Antoinette dans les pamphlets (1989) and idem, ‘L’heroıne du crime: Marie-Antoinette dansles pamphlets’, La carmagnole des muses, l’homme de lettres et l’artiste dans la Re volution, ed.

J.-C. Bonnet (1988), pp. 245–60. Two excellent articles by J. Revel, ‘Marie-Antoinette’, Dictionnairecritique de la Re volution franc ¸aise, ed. F. Furet and M. Ozouf (1988), pp. 186–98 and idem, ‘Marie-

Antoinette in her fictions: the staging of hatred’, Fictions of the French Revolution, ed. B. Fort(Evanston, Ill., 1991), pp. 111–29. S. Maza, ‘L’image de la souveraine: feminite et politique dans lespamphlets de l’affaire du Collier’, in The press in the French Revolution, ed. H. Chisick, I. Zinguer and

O. Elyada, Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 281 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 363–78; idem,‘The diamond necklace affair revisited (1785–1786): the case of the missing queen, Eroticism and thebody politic , pp. 63–89; and idem, Private lives and public affairs, the causes ce lebres of prerevolutionary France (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), ch. 4.

2 G. Kates, ‘You’ve got mail’, Eight-Ct St , 35 (2001), 149; A. de Baecque, The body politic:corporeal metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770–1800 (Stanford, Calif., 1997), pp. 48–50,does similarly for both pamphlets and prints.



Darnton argues that scandalous, indeed pornographic tales circulating over thecenturies purporting to unveil the moral rot at the core of the Bourbon

monarchy constituted a ‘political folklore’, a ‘narrative frame’, a ‘metatext’ that

shaped the minds of the French and conditioned their judgement of their rulers and government.3 Such libelles in the late eighteenth century dissolved

the legitimacy of the monarchy and hence the allegiance of the French

people to the person of the king – and that of the queen – and to the insti-tution of monarchy. This argument, and the evidence provided, raise certain

questions.

Innocuously labelled ‘philosophical books’ by their purveyors, libelles sharedhigh place in Darnton’s lists of ‘best sellers’ with writings of Enlightenment

philosophes. Although Darnton fixes his attention on scandal-writers like

The´ veneau de Morande and Pidansat de Mairobert, who inflated and transmutedgossip into pretended peerings into royal boudoirs, eighteenth-century sellers

and buyers of books, as seen in Darnton’s lists of purchases and sales, equally sought to acquire Voltaire, d’Holbach and Rousseau. The reading field was not

exclusively, perhaps not even predominantly, occupied by scandalous or

lascivious pamphlets. Moreover, a book may not always be ‘known’ by its title.

The Me moires secrets that Darnton categorizes as ‘chroniques scandaleuses’ was a manuscript newsletter whose gossip was usually about the sexual

liaisons of nobles and stars of the theatre and opera, with some accounts of

murders and robberies, but little scandal touching the royal family. Equally not

‘scandalous’, despite its title, was its companion on that list, La chronique

scandaleuse, that merely reprinted articles from another series of ‘unscan-dalous’ manuscript newsletters known as the Correspondance litte raire

secrete. And if a book may not be known by its title, may the words in the

book be taken literally? Roger Chartier has convincingly argued that books are

‘appropriated’ by readers to meet their own understanding and needs in waysthat might diverge from the author’s original message.4 For Darnton ‘appro-

priation’ is replaced by the assumption of a literal reading of libelles: reports

of moral dissolution in the life of the king and his mistresses (in his manner of

presentation) had a direct effect by eroding the allegiance of the king’ssubjects. Furthermore, all the tales of royal lasciviousness listed in Darnton’scorpus of ‘best sellers’ were written during or shortly after the death of Louis

XV in 1774 and, more importantly, were directed at Louis XV and his mistresses,

V I V I A N R . G R U D E R 271

3 R. Darnton, The literary underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 1–70,167–208. Other writings by Darnton that bear on this theme are: idem, ‘Livres philosophiques’, in Enlightenment essays in memory of Robert Shackleton, ed. G. Barber and C. P. Courtney (Oxford,1988), pp. 89–107; idem, ‘The forbidden books of pre-Revolutionary France’, Rewriting the French

Revolution, pp. 1–32; idem, Edition et se dition: l’univers de la litte rature clandestine au xviii e

siecle (1991); idem, The forbidden best-sellers of pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1995);idem, ‘An early information society: news and the media in eighteenth-century Paris’, Am Hist R ,105 (2000), 1–35.

4 R. Chartier, ‘Culture as appropriation: popular cultural uses in early modern France’, inUnderstanding popular culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, ed. S. L.Kaplan (Berlin, 1984), pp. 229–53.



Pompadour and Dubarry.5 By implication and occasional passing reference,Darnton extends his argument to the scandalous libelles against Marie-

Antoinette.6 The queen is again undergoing a belated and vicarious guillo-

tining as charges in late eighteenth-century pornography echo in the currentinterpretation of the influence of such representations of royalty, placing upon

her a responsibility for the Revolution.

Is theory corroborated by evidence? Did attacks against Louis XV’s dissolutepersonal life carry over to tarnish the person of Louis XVI, especially since the

latter’s sexuality and behaviour differed markedly from those of his prede-

cessor? Were similar tales circulating against the grandson and his wife as hadcirculated against the grandfather and his mistresses? And did they have similar

effect? This requires a quantitative as well as a qualitative examination: to

determine the varied scandalous materials that circulated before 1789, to seehow the French may have read and interpreted them, as well as to suggestinterpretations historians may offer. The number of these materials, whether many or few, did not necessarily equate with the force of their influence.

Pamphlets and also verses, songs and images that projected scandalous repre-

sentations of the queen in the years prior to the Revolution will constitute the

corpus of this investigation.

I

The libelles in the years after Louis XV and before the Revolution remain

largely terra incognita.7 Was scandal-mongering so ubiquitous then, and was

its impact on public opinion so great as to justify a ‘pornographic’ interpre-tation of the origins of the French Revolution?

The new reign of Louis XVI, which began in 1774, enjoyed a dispensation

from the sins of the grandfather, in a manner similar to the passage from one


5 R. Darnton, The corpus of clandestine literature in France 1769–1789 (New York, 1995),

passim. A number of the writings Darnton cites appeared in the first year of the reign of Louis XVI;see Me moires secrets pour servir a l’histoire de la re publique des lettres en France, depuis MDCCLXII jusqu’a nos jours (36 vols., 1777–89), 6 Oct. 1775, viii. 198; 7 Nov. 1775, viii. 238; 12and 13 Nov. 1775, viii. 247; 20 Nov. 1775, viii. 258–9; 25 Nov. 1775, viii. 266.

6 Darnton, The literary underground , pp. 224–6.7 Pioneers in the early twentieth century in exploring the corpus of diatribes against Marie-

Antoinette were Henri d’Almeras, Marie-Antoinette et les pamphlets royalistes et re volutionnaires(1907) and Hector Fleischmann in the following books: Les pamphlets libertins contre Marie- Antoinette d’apre s des documents nouveaux et les pamphlets tire s de l’Enfer de la Bibliotheque Nationale (Geneva, 1970 [1908]); Marie-Antoinette libertine. Bibliographie critique et analytiquedes pamphlets politiques, galants et obscenes contre la reine. Pre ce de e de la re impressioninte grale de quatre libelles rarissimes et d’une histoire des pamphle taires du re gne de Louis XVI

(1911); Les maıtresses de Marie-Antoinette (1910); and Madame de Polignac et la cour galante de Marie-Antoinette (1910). In addition to Maza’s writings (n. 1 above) the following also have writtenmore briefly on Marie-Antoinette in the pre-Revolutionary years: G. Chaussinand-Nogaret, La viequotidienne des femmes du roi d’Agne s Sorel a Marie-Antoinette (1990), pp. 223–41; J. Merrick,‘Sexual politics and public order in late eighteenth-century France: the Me moires secrets and theCorrespondance secrete’, J Hist Sexuality, 1 (1990), 78–84; and S. Schama’s Citizens: a chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989), pp. 203–27.



presidential administration to another in the United States. The young king, andespecially the young queen who had so visibly disliked Dubarry, seemed

initially to heighten the moral tone of the court. After reading La vie prive e de

Louis XV , one of Darnton’s ‘forbidden best sellers’, the marquis de Bombelles,ambassador and courtier, lauded Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette who stood in

stark contrast to Louis XV and his mistresses: ‘the court is no longer the centre

of insupportable corruption. Virtue shows itself, is supported and pleases themaster who honours and practises it.’8 Yet fresh scurrilous gossip quickly

circulated against the young royal couple, in particular against the queen. In

comparison to the flow against Louis XV (almost 800 copies of three pam-phlets) and Dubarry (slightly over 1,300 copies of three pamphlets)9, Darnton’s

documentation reveals a paucity of writings against Marie-Antoinette before

1789: thirty-two copies of three pamphlets, sold to a single bookseller at anundetermined date, and a fourth pamphlet seized twice by the customs in1781.10

To ‘map’ the varied attacks against Marie-Antoinette we may turn to other

contemporary sources. Our most accessible and reliable guides are manuscript

newsletters, the Me moires secrets supplemented by the Correspondance

secrete and the journal of the Parisian bookseller Hardy, for these could befrank, even audacious, since they escaped the scrutiny of censors. Both Hardy

and Mouffle d’Angerville, the writer of the Me moires secrets during most of

Louis XVI’s reign, were critics of the government; neither had any partisan

prejudice to inhibit their reporting of criticism. These newsletters reported onpamphlets as well as on songs, doggerels and caricatures, gossip and news, allof which yield a broader image of the defamation directed against the queen. 11

Criticisms in writings and by word of mouth began in 1774 and continued with

varying intensity through 1788, with high points in 1778–83, 1785–6 and 1787–

8. Not all pamphlets are known to us, yet some whose titles we know werenot all published and widely known to contemporaries, thus the number of

pamphlets in circulation and their impact are uncertain. Nor may all these

pamphlets be deemed pornographic, exhibiting the queen in immoral sexual


8 Marquis de Bombelles, Journal , ed. J. Grassion and F. Durif, 2 vols., i. 82, 20 Oct. 1781.9 Darnton, The corpus of clandestine literature, pp. 194–6.10 Ibid. 15 (no. 18), 140 (no. 518), 152 (no. 577), 184 (no. 705). For two additional libels listed,

dating from 1789, see 64–5 (no. 218) and 260, Me moires justificatifs de la comtesse de Valois de la Motte, e crits par elle-meme (1789).

11 Me moires secrets; the two from the Metra series – Correspondance litte raire secrete, which Iconsulted for the years 1786–8, and Correspondance secrete ine dite sur Louis XVI, Marie- Antoinette, la cour et la ville de 1777 a 1792, ed. M. de Lescure (2 vols., 1866); and B[ibliotheque]N[ationale] MS Fr. 6685–6, Simeon-Prosper Hardy, ‘Mes loisirs, ou Journal d’e venemens tels qu’ilsparviennent a ma connaissance’, vols. vi–viii. Hardy’s journal should be understood as a manuscript

newsletter, which he addressed to his readers, rather than as a diary, whereas the Me moires secrets were published in London as printed volumes a few years after their original appearance asnewsletters. The Metra newsletters, furthermore, were published outside of France. On theCorrespondance litte raire secrete and the Me moires secrets see Dictionnaire des journaux 1600–1789, ed. J. Sgard (2 vols., 1991), i. 255–62, ii. 829–905; for the latter also see The Me moires secretsand the culture of publicity in eighteenth-century France, ed. J. Popkin and B. Fort (Oxford,1998).



acts; others exude vitriolic criticism of her person or her actions devoid of any sexual allusions.

As early as the first year of the reign, four years into the marriage of the

young royal couple, their infertility set tongues wagging. Ridicule of the king’s virility and probable impotence yielded the counter-image of a queen whose

voracious sexual appetite drove her to both men and women.12 The absence of

a royal mistress also left the queen the major target for royal scandal-mongering. A pattern appeared during the first three years of the new reign.

Salacious verses in song and gossip circulated. Four pamphlets were written,

but only one was published. The most innocuous criticized the queen’s use of feathers in her hair, reports of which unleashed a tongue-lashing from the

empress-mother to her royal daughter. More vicious were tales that turned the

queen’s evening walks in the park of Versailles into sexual escapades. Carryingthe most serious political overtones was Avis important a la branche

espagnole, which impugned before the fact the legitimacy of future royalprogeny and led the Empress Maria-Theresa to imprison its purported author,

Beaumarchais. That some writings circulated in those early years is attested by

the arrest of a Parisian bookseller for having sold libels ‘against the queen’ and

the Sardinian ambassador’s reference to ‘audacious’ couplets.13 In addition, acritical article against both the king and the queen appeared in a French-

language newspaper in London.

The years from 1779 to 1783 witnessed the largest number of scandalous

pamphlets (nine) – comical, polemical and pornographic. The louse whosettled fleetingly on Marie-Antoinette’s bosom, a metaphorical spy in the court,expressed mischievous thoughts not of the queen but of the ministers and

others.14 With the Supple ment a l’espion anglois (1781) came political attacks

against the queen. Her extravagant spending, her interference in government

decisions and her purported role as an agent of Austrian diplomacy wereactions that undermined the interests of France. These charges would resound

during the Revolution, yet this pamphlet is absent from Darnton’s list of

clandestine best sellers in the 1780s. The most famous (or infamous)

pornographic pamphlets also made their evanescent appearance: Les amours

de Charlot et Toinette (1779), Essai historique sur la vie de Marie-Antoinette,

reine de France, pour servir a l’histoire de cette princesse (1781), and Le


12 On the denigration of the king: de Baecque, The body politic , pp. 9–51.13 These pamphlets, respectively, were Lettre des laboureuses de la paroisse de Noissy, pre s de

Versailles, a la Reine; Les nuits de Marie-Antoinette (the only printed pamphlet) and Lever del’Aurore. See Fleischmann, Les pamphlets libertins, pp. 48, 102, and Marie-Antoinette libertine,pp. 29–30, 32 n. 1. For the arrest: M. Frantz Funck-Brentano, Les lettres de cachet a Paris: e tude suivie d’une liste des prisonniers de la Bastille (1659–1789) (1903), p. 401. Les quatorze

e tourderies et les sept simplicite s de la Reine is the title of the ‘couplets’ which the Sardinianambassador commented on in December 1775; see Les correspondances des agents diplomatiquese trangers en France avant la Re volution conserve es dans les archives de Berlin, Dresde, Geneve,Turin, Genes, Florence, Naples, Simancas, Lisbonne, Londres, La Haye et Vienne, ed. J.Flammermont (1896), p. 331.

14 My thanks to Annie Duprat for her suggestion about the metaphorical usage of the image of alouse circulating in the royal court.



portefeuil d’un talon rouge (178[1]).15 Obscene verses and songs alsocirculated. An exploration of why so many sensationalist writings against the

queen appeared in these years reveals some of the dynamics that produced, in

particular, political pornography.These were the years between the births of the first royal child, the eldest

daughter, and the dauphin, giving occasion to cast doubt on their legitimacy.

The years 1778 to 1783 also saw a succession of Austrian diplomatic initiativesthat aroused the ire of those in France who opposed and sought to end the

alliance with Austria by impugning the queen and her offspring.16 Immediately

connected to the appearance of these pamphlets was the war, in these same years, between France and Great Britain over the independence of the new

United States. Scandal could be a propaganda tool against the Bourbons to

weaken the French resolve in war, hence the willingness of British authoritiesto permit French expatriates in London to write political pornography. Thecorrespondence between the French embassy in London and the royalgovernment in Paris confirms the London origins of seven pamphlets plus a

set of verses in the years 1779 to 1783, four clearly directed against the

queen. That correspondence also provides proof of literary blackmail; the

writer(s), printer and government police official turned middleman attemptedto sell six pamphlets and a book of verses to the French government in

return for a promise not to print them.17 These individuals were repeating

the practice that had brought a small fortune to the pamphleteer The veneau

de Morande: threatening a public figure with the publication of scandaloustales in the hope of extorting money in exchange for the manuscript. Inaddition, two pamphlets bearing London imprints (but whose provenance

cannot be confirmed) also contained scandalous charges against Marie-

Antoinette.18


15 Other pamphlets for the years 1779 to 1783 include [Delauney], Histoire d’un pou franc ¸ais(1779), La naissance d’un dauphin (1783), Les amusements de la Reine, and Les passetemps

d’Antoinette (1783). The last three do not appear in the holdings of the BN. See also n. 17 below.This list does not preclude other titles still hidden away in libraries and archives or lost to thehistorical record. In December 1781 the ambassador of Saxony reported that the king had read Vie prive e d’Antoinette; perhaps this was the Essai historique sur la vie de Marie-Antoinette of thesame year. See Les correspondances des agents diplomatiques, p. 195.

16 For more on the Austrian connection, see below pp. 292–3.17 A[rchives des] A[ffaires] E[trangeres,] Correspondance politique, Angleterre, MSS 541–2;

[Louis] Pierre Manuel, La police de Paris de voile e (2 vols., ‘L’An second de la liberte’ [1791]), i.241–9; and d’Almeras, Marie-Antoinette, passim. The titles offered for sale were (against the queen) La naissance du dauphin de voile e, Les passetemps d’Antoinette, Les amours de Charlot et Toinette and Les amusements de la Reine; (against ministers) Les petits soupers et les nuits del’Hotel de Bouillon and Les amours du visir de Vergen*** ; and ‘couplets de noels’ (satirical

verses). La Maison de Bourbon is listed as a title of a pamphlet, but with no indication of itscontents or its inclusion for sale.18 These are [Ange Goudar], Le Proce s des trois rois, Louis XVI de France-Bourbon, Charles III,

d’Espagne-Bourbon, et George III, d’Hanovre (1780), p. 145 and n. 171; and [Joseph Lanjuinais],Supple ment a l’Espion Anglois, ou Lettres inte ressantes sur la retraite de M. Necker; sur le sort dela France et de l’Angleterre; et sur la de tention de M. Linguet a la Bastille. Adresse es a Mylord All’Eye par l’Auteur de l’Espion Anglois (1781), pp. 19–21, 26.



Gossip from Versailles crossed the Channel, whether by travellers or incorrespondence, and fed the febrile imagination of smut writers – a de classe

noble and clergyman, scheming and mercenary royal agents, needy young

writers (Brissot’s name sometimes appearing among them). They magnifiedand embroidered rumours into titillating tales ranging from Les amours de

Charlot et Toinette, whose sweet and lyrical sensualism betrays the poetic art

of its purported author Beaumarchais, to the vulgar pornography of Essai

historique sur la vie de Marie-Antoinette.19 These two, and a few others, hit

the royal jackpot when the crown bought the manuscripts. In May 1783 entire

editions of Les amours de Charlot et Toinette and of Le portefeuil d’un talon

rouge, plus 534 copies of Essai historique sur la vie de Marie-Antoinette –

seventeen editions and translations had already been printed – were under

lock and key in the Bastille. Only after the capture of the Bastille in 1789 freedboth prisoners and pamphlets did the Essai historique and Les amours de

Charlot et Toinette gain wide currency in France, their reincarnations in later editions offering more explicit details of sexual excess in word and image.20

Two of those involved in the literary blackmail also ended in the Bastille as did,

between 1781 and 1784, six other writers, printers and distributors of these

‘bad books’ – not all of them against the queen.21 Le proce s des trois rois

(also bearing a London imprint), whose broad canvas of outrageous charges

against powerful personages contained brief pornographic aspersions on the

character of Marie-Antoinette, was reported to be circulating in Brussels,

Holland and Paris in late 1780 and in 1781, and was twice confiscated by customs authorities.22


19 In addition to the correspondence of the French embassy in London see the following:B[ibliotheque] M[unicipale], Orleans, MS 1422, ‘Memoires de Jean Charles Pierre Le Noir,lieutenant general de police de la ville de Paris (1732–1807)’; Paul Robiquet, The veneau de Morande: e tude sur le xviii e siecle (1882); Manuel, La police de Paris de voile e, i. 236–8, 256–7, ii.236–8, 250–3; d’Almeras, Marie-Antoinette, passim; and Fleischmann, Les Pamphlets libertins,passim.

20

The 1781 edition of Essai historique sur la vie de Marie-Antoinette does not appear onDarnton’s list, only that of 1789 (Darnton, The corpus of clandestine literature, 64, no. 218). The1789 editions bearing the same or similar titles (see below, n. 33) differ from the original of 1781.These claim to recount facts since 1781, are written in the first person, and the events recalled andrelations described are changed; for example, Marie-Antoinette and Artois are graphically presentedas lovers. See also below, p. 282.

21 Manuel, La police de Paris de voile e, i. 37–8; BM, Orleans, MS 1422, ‘Memoires de . . . Le Noir’,fos. 53–6, 307; and Fleischmann, Les Pamphlets libertins, p. 120. For those arrested (includingBrissot), see [Louis Pierre Manuel], La Bastille de voile e, ou Recueil de pieces authentiques pour servir a son histoire (3 vols., 1789), iii. 12, and Funck-Brentano, Les lettres de cachet , pp. 408–10,413. Only three other writings that included attacks against Marie-Antoinette were found in theBastille after its capture: Le Proce s des trois rois, Supple ment a l’Espion Anglois, and Deux

patriotiques ou discours prononce s a l’occasion de la grossesse de la reine (1778), this last notfound in the BN; see Paris, B[ibliotheque de l’]A[rsenal], Archives de la Bastille 10305.22 Darnton, The corpus of clandestine Literature, 152, no. 577. On Le proce s des trois rois, see

Me moires secrets, 22 Dec. 1780, xv. 108, and 9 Feb. 1781, xvii. 57. Nicolas Ruault, Gazette d’un Parisien sous la Re volution: lettres a son frere, 1783–1796 , ed. A. Vassal (1976), p. 22, reported inMay 1783 that Les passetemps d’Antoinette was coming from London to Paris, but he does notindicate if he ever saw or read a copy.



In 1783 a number of events seriously reduced the publication of sensational writing. The war with Great Britain was over, and the government also changed

its policy towards the output of French exiles. Darnton argues that a new order

from foreign minister Vergennes, issued on 12 June 1783, which required thebooksellers’ guild in Paris to inspect all imported books, effectively cut down

the circulation of libelles.23 The royal government also decided not to purchase

these manuscripts on the advice of the ambassador in London; to succumb toblackmail, he argued, only increased the supply of scandal whereas a policy of

‘mepris’ – of ignoring the smut and pornography – would reduce their pro-

duction.24 This luxuriant source in London did dry up. The question arises whether the threat of blackmail and the response of royal payoffs supplied

artificial sustenance: was there or was there not a public, as well as a commer-

cial market, for royal scandal sufficient to stimulate its production in theabsence of ‘government subsidies’?The diamond necklace affair in 1785–6, a scandal overcharged with sexual

imagery, yielded its lascivious pamphlets, but few targeted or implicated Marie-

Antoinette. Me moires by the lawyers defending those on trial – the Cardinal de

Rohan, Mme de Lamotte, Cagliostro and Mlle d’Oliva, the young woman who

unknowingly played the part of the queen in the midnight meeting with thecardinal in the garden of Versailles – poured from the presses recounting these

bizarre events, all of which riveted the public’s attention. Neither these

me moires, nor the reported testimony of the defendants, implicated the queen.

On the contrary, even Mme de Lamotte’s lawyer viewed Marie-Antoinette asblameless. The crown’s staunchest adversaries, the Jansenist magistrates in the Parlement of Paris who stoutly proclaimed the cardinal’s innocence, expressly

exculpated the queen of involvement in obtaining the necklace and rejected

the thought of a nocturnal rendezvous between the queen and the cardinal;

surely silence would have been more forceful had they sought to inculpate her.Proof of the queen’s innocence – and of Mme de Lamotte’s guilt – came with

the dramatic confession of her accomplice and probable paramour, Retaux de

Villette, that he had signed the queen’s name for the purchase of the necklace,

and that Mlle d’Oliva disguised as the queen had the encounter with thecardinal. Marie-Antoinette’s sole fault, commented upon at the trial before the Parlement , was a fondness for jewellery, tempered however by her sense of

the need to limit her personal expenses for the benefit of government and

national interests.25 The final judgement of the Parlement of Paris clearly and


23 Darnton, The literary underground , pp. 191–6. Nonetheless the order proved ineffectiveagainst a renewed outpouring of pamphlets in 1787 and 1788 during the last political crisis of theancien re gime.

24

AAE MS 542 fo. 317r

, letter of French ambassador, 28 May 1783. It should be noted thatLondon also produced scurrilous pamphlets and caricatures against the British royal family in thesesame years.

25 Compte rendu de ce qui s’est passe au Parlement relativement a l’affaire de M. le Cardinal de Rohan (1786), especially pp. 18–20 (the argument of the leading Jansenist critic of thegovernment, Robert de Saint-Vincent), 61, 66, 90, 116, 120, 131, 142; and Me moire pour Dame Jeanne de Saint-Remy de Valois, Epouse du Comte de la Motte, pp. 16, 21, 39.



explicitly declared her innocence by unequivocally affirming that the signaturefound on documents in the case were ‘fraudulent’ and ‘falsely attributed to the

queen’.26

In addition to the legal me moires, news accounts allude to libellesrecounting the Rohan trial or attacking the queen or the court, but indicate

only three titles, one alone bearing the queen’s name. The other two had no

criticism of the queen, one indeed praising her and refuting any notion of arendezvous. These pamphlets were mocking attacks against all those on trial.

The Lettre d’un garde du roi recounting the purported sexual liaisons of

Cardinal de Rohan was designed as a cheap and popular work to make money,and was the title that the government singled out for repression, three of the

eight people arrested in 1786 being involved in its publication or distribution. 27

An anonymous author believed that this particular pamphlet was not‘incendiary’ for it only put in writing what everyone was already saying; thepolice, wanting to suppress it, made the king believe that it was dangerous.28

The police were especially active in repressing writings; they raided a secret

print-shop in Paris and netted individuals accused of selling, printing or writing

scandalous pamphlets, among them a grocer, the nephew of a bishop, a royal

officeholder and an officer in the queen’s own household.29 Rarely before or after was the government’s hand so effective.

Historians for their part proffer additional titles of libels on the diamond

necklace affair, accompanied by judgements that this scandal destroyed the

queen’s reputation among her subjects and undermined the Bourbon regime.30


26 AN X/2b/1417 no. 96: Parlement de Paris, proces du collier. A printed resume of the entirecase and trial may be found in Arret de la cour de Parlement, rendu a Grand’Chambre assemble e,le trente-un mai 1786 (1786). The words in quotation marks were underlined in the original arret and italicized in the printed edition (no. 141 A, p. 30).

27 Les nuits d’Antoinette is the title of a libel (as yet unfound) that the Paris bookseller, Nicolas

Ruault, reports was one of the writings that Pierre-Jacques Le Maıtre, an office-holder in the royalgovernment, was suspected of printing at the time of his arrest in 1785; see Ruault, Gazette d’un Parisien sous la Re volution, letter of 29 Jan. 1786, p. 67, and also Me moires secrets, 5 Mar. 1786,xxxi. 146–7. For the background of Le Maıtre see J. D. Popkin, ‘Pamphlet journalism at the end of the Old Regime’, Eight-Ct St , 22 (1989), 351–5. The other two were Suite des observations de Motus, sur le Me moire de Mle. D’Oliva (A. Lima, 1786) and Lettre d’un garde du roi, pour servir de suite aux Me moires sur Cagliostro (1786); on the latter see Funck-Brentano, Les lettres decachet , pp. 415–16 and n. 2.

28 Lettre du chevalier de ***, a un Anglois; contenant le Bulletin de ce qui s’est passe au Parlement de Paris, dans le Proce s de M. le cardinal de Rohan, Grand-Aumonier de France, Eveque et Prince de Strasbourg, landgrave d’Alsace, juge par Arret du 31 mai 1786 (1786),p. 24.

29

BN MS Fr. 6685, Hardy, vi, 15 Oct. 1786, fo. 443, wrote that the secret printshop in the Enclosdu Temple printed libels against the queen, but he does not indicate what these were. For a list of those arrested see Manuel, La Bastille de voile e, iii. 13, 105–11, and Funck-Brentano, Les lettres decachet , pp. 415–16. See also above, n. 27.

30 As examples Frantz Funck-Brentano, L’affaire du collier d’apre s de nouveaux documents,2nd edn (1901), pp. 1–9, 287, 319–20, and more recently E. Lever, Marie-Antoinette (1991),pp. 401, 409–11.



But what do these pamphlets actually tell us?31 The queen is either notmentioned or she is praised; one reference to her love of jewellery stands

against two recitations of her refusal years earlier to purchase the necklace in

deference to the government’s more urgent need for ships. In none is sheremotely or indirectly implicated in fraud or a nocturnal liaison. A reader then

or later would have to engage in radical deconstruction to read laudatory

comments, however formal and rhetorical they may have been, as disguisedattacks. The main personages in this story, Cardinal de Rohan first and

foremost, but also Cagliostro and Mme de Lamotte, received the barbs, the

cardinal most often depicted as a dupe of the other two. In short, thescandalous libels on the diamond necklace affair revolved not around Marie-

Antoinette but those placed on trial, especially the gullible cardinal, and most

of the government’s repression aimed to stop attacks in print on a prince of theChurch.The years of political crisis, 1787–8, saw the second largest number of

pamphlets against the queen, six or perhaps five (only rumours of the

existence or non-existence of one, attributed to Lord Gordon, circulated).

L’histoire d’Aurore may have been a recycling of the 1774 Lever de l’Aurore,

both of which plus Pour elle Messaline may be lost to the historical record. And Histoire du collier (the single such title in the Bibliotheque Nationale,

dated 1785) is a collection of clerical and legal documents related to the trial

and devoid of piquant scandalous material. The remaining two replayed and

salaciously re-embroidered the diamond necklace affair. The self-proclaimedauthor of one of the purported ‘memoires’ of the comtesse de Lamotteacknowledged the writing to be a ‘literary’ creation rather than an historical

account.32 Tales of Marie-Antoinette’s guilt – her desire for the diamond

necklace, her collusion and amorous relations with both Mme de Lamotte and


31 I have found the following pamphlets, in addition to those cited above, relating to thediamond necklace affair: Histoire ve ritable de Jeanne de S.-Remi, ou les aventures de la comtessede la Motte (Villefranche, 1786); La derniere piece du fameux collier [1786]; Lettre a l’occasion de

la de tention de S.E.M. le Cardinal de Rohan a la Bastille (1785); Lettre de l’abbe G. a la C. D*** and Lettre de la C. de M***[Moue] a l’Abbe G***[Gorzel] , these last two in Recueil de piecesauthentiques et inte ressantes, pour servir d’e claircissement a l’affaire concernant le cardinal, prince de Rohan (Strasbourg, 1786); Memoire authentique pour servir a l’histoire du comte deCagliostro, nouv. ed. (Strasbourg, 1786); and Re flexions de P.-J.-J.-N. Motus sur le me moire ouroman qui a paru en fe vrier 1786 pour le soi-disant comte de Cagliostro (1786).

32 Me moire justificatif de la comtesse de La Motte (1788), and La Reine de voile e, ou supple ment aux me moires de la comtesse de Lamotte (1789). The ‘literary’ as opposed to‘historical’ basis of the Me moire justificatif de la comtesse de La Motte is attested by the words of the man who claimed to have written it; see [Alphonse (Antoine) Joseph de Serres de la Tour], Appel au bon sens, dans lequel M. de la Tour soumet a ce juge infaillible, les de tails de saconduite relativement a une affaire qui fait quelque bruit dans le monde (1788), pp. 13, 18, 19,

31. The marquis de Bombelles, Journal , ii. 260, also reports on an apologetic pamphlet for theCardinal de Rohan that was circulating in November 1788. Other material – the ‘tant d’autres’ without title mentioned in contemporary newsletters – may still be hidden in archives and libraries,and many such ephemeral writings may have quickly disappeared as often happened, but this is thesum of the material culled from the Me moires secrets of 1774–87, from Hardy’s journal of 1785–8,from the Correspondance secrete, ed. Lescure, of 1774–88, and from the Correspondance litte raire secrete of 1787 and 1788.



Cardinal de Rohan, and her attempt to shift guilt from herself to the other two – did surface in pamphlets that appeared in 1789, once the Revolution

was already under way.33 One of these authors made explicit both the fictional

nature of his work and its political purpose. The narrative, he admitted, is ‘alittle exaggerated’; since a previous ‘memoir of madame de Lamotte lacked

effect’, he aimed to compose a libelle, a form of writing that ‘defames, calum-

niates, outrages’, so as to weaken the queen’s credit before the nation for allthe evil she has done and will continue to do.34 Through writings such as these

we may see the making of a myth that has endured over the centuries.

This literary ‘mapping’ yields few scurrilous pamphlets against the queenbefore 1789, apart from the exceptional years 1779–83; even fewer, it seems,

were actually published and in the hands and under the eyes of the French

public. One may wonder just how strong a force in itself and how corrosive inits political effects was the political pornography contained in the pamphlets. Yet verses, puns ( calembours ) and songs with rhymes easily remembered andmelodies often from familiar tunes, along with gossip, passed from person to

person by word of mouth, more easily escaping censorship but leaving few

precise traces of their circuit.35 They, too, spread the image of a lascivious,

profligate and evil queen.Malicious jests and verse about the queen’s sexual activities with both male

and female lovers, coupled with the king’s supposed impotence, arose in 1776,

prior to the correction of the king’s erectile dysfunction;36 these reappeared in

1781 when rumour impugned the legitimacy of the dauphin’s birth.37 Among


33 These pamphlets are Me moires justificatifs de la comtesse de La Motte, e crits par elle-meme(1788) (the last page of this edition bears the place and date ‘Londres le 1 janvier 1789’); Me moires justificatifs de la comtesse de Valois de la Motte, e crits par elle-meme (1789) (this edition also givesthe date 1 January 1789); Second me moire justificatif de la comtesse de Valois de Lamotte, e crit par elle-meme (1789); Essai historique sur la vie de Marie-Antoinette, reine de France et de Navarre,ne e archiduchesse d’Autriche, le deux novembre 1755: Orne de son portrait, et redige sur plusieursmanuscrits de sa main; seconde partie (Versailles, ‘de l’an de la liberte Francoise’, 1789); and Essai historique sur la vie de Marie-Antoinette d’Autriche, reine de France: Pour servir a l’histoire de

cette princesse (2 vols., 1789). The last three works were all published after 14 July 1789.34 Ibid., introduction, pp. i–iii. This comment underscores the dilemma historians face: theliterary effect of words on paper should not be conflated with their social and political effect.

35 Darnton, in ‘An early information society’, turns his attention to verses, songs and gossip as anetwork for the circulation of political views, but his examples in this article come only from a few

years around 1750.36 For an English translation of the Spanish ambassador’s report to his king, detailing Louis XVI’s

physical problem, known as phimosis, see de Baecque, The body politic , pp. 42–3. Either the kinghad an operation to remove the difficulty or, de Baecque suggests, a surgical procedure wasperformed on Marie-Antoinette.

37 Emile Raunie, Chansonnier historique du xviii e siecle (10 vols., 1884), ix. 77–82, x. 229–37,287–95, contains one verse satire from early 1776 depicting the queen as a lesbian. The two poems

of 1781 impugning the legitimacy of the dauphin are found in Satyres, ou Choix des meilleures pieces de vers qui ont pre ce de et suivi la Re volution (‘L’An premier de la Liberte’ [1789]), pp. 20–9, as well as in the contemporaneous Dijon collection, BN MS Fr. 12860 fos. 377–80. In contrast

was a poissard poem to the queen welcoming the dauphin’s birth: ‘Harangue des Poissardes deParis a la Reine, sur la naissance de Msgr. le Dauphin, en Octobre 1781’, Les Muses du Foyer del’Ope ra. Choix des poe sies libres, galantes, satyriques et autres, les plus agre ables qui ont circule depuis quelques anne es dans les Socie te s galantes de Paris. Au Caffe du Caveau, 1783.



the eight known verses and songs circulating in 1785–6 on the diamondnecklace affair, only one made a gross attack on her behaviour, equating

Marie-Antoinette with Mlle d’Oliva, a purported prostitute.38 Another poem

criticized the queen as well as the king for exiling the cardinal following hisacquittal by the Parlement , while a popular ‘vaudeville’ – satirical verses –

mocking the personages involved in the trial made no reference to the queen.

The remaining poems targeted either Rohan or the comtesse de Lamotte, butnot Marie-Antoinette.39 The ‘very wicked’ verses in circulation, that Hardy

reported in his Journal , criticized ministers and courtiers, even the king, but

he does not mention the queen among them.40

‘Bad talk’ may have been more prevalent than pamphlets and even poems. In

the early years of the new reign criticisms targeted the queen’s expensive

favours to friends, her extravagant dress and heavy losses in card games. Duringthe 1770s the Habsburg ambassador to France, Mercy-Argenteau, who kept aclose eye on everything related to the queen, reported the gossip to theempress Maria-Theresa in tones of pique and insouciance. So too the queen, in

letters to her mother, brushed off what was said and written about her as just

something the French typically did, and of no consequence. Most of the acerbic

gossip and talk especially about the king and queen, cited by the publisher Ruault and the author of the Me moires pour servir a l’histoire de la fin du

XVIIIe siecle, only began to circulate in 1787. In that year and the following

year the Habsburg ambassador became distressed about the seriousness of

verbal attacks against Marie-Antoinette and their broad dissemination in thepublic, and for the first time he described the queen as deeply distraught by them.41

With the convocation of the Assembly of Notables in 1787, the number of

songs and poems, puns, placards and ‘bad talk’ in general increased as did their

negative character, totalling sixty for the two years 1787–8. A number of theseaimed at more than one person: the king and queen, the king and a minister,

two or more ministers, and all of them together. The queen was outdistanced

by both the king and the minister Lomenie de Brienne in both the multiple


38 ‘Apostrophe de la Reine a Mlle. d’Oliva’, Satyres, pp. 15–16, 18–20. This is probably the‘reprehensible’ and ‘indecent’ quatrain on Marie-Antoinette and Mlle d’Oliva mentioned in the Me moires secrets on 1 May 1786, xxxii. 14.

39 See P. Barbier and Fr. Vernillat, Histoire de France par les chansons, 8 vols., IV, La Re volution(1957), pp. 25–8; the verse ‘Alleluya sur l’affaire du collier’ mocking those involved in the trial wasreprinted in a shorter version in Me moires secrets, xxxi. 237–8. For the others see Satyres, pp. 15–16, 18–20.

40 BN MS Fr. 6685, Hardy, vi, 30 Apr. 1786, fos. 336–7.41 For the years before 1780 see Marie-Antoinette. Correspondance secrete entre Marie-The re se

et le comte de Mercy-Argenteau avec les lettres de Marie-The re se et de Marie-Antoinette, ed. Alfredd’Arneth et M. A. Geffroy (3 vols., 1874), i. 97, ii. 97, 214, 231–4, 307 n. 1, 312–13, 317–22, 334,344 n. 2, 387, 410, 416–17, 420, 480–1, 488, iii. 18, 25, 27, 31–2, 35, 101, 119–20, 123, 141, 145,155–6, 215–16, 237, 295–6, 321, 351, 388, 409, 411–12, 426, 429, 440; for the letters of Marie-

Antoinette, ibid. ii. 404, 414–16. For the years from 1780: Correspondance secrete du comte de Mercy-Argenteau avec l’Empereur Joseph II et le prince de Kaunitz , ed. Alfred d’Arneth and JulesFlammermont (2 vols., 1889 and 1891), ii. 113, 122–3, 165, 189–96.



attacks and those directed against a single individual.42 So too were there moreharsh, scurrilous poems and talk against the king (seven), than against the queen

(two). He was called an ‘imbecile’, cowardly and ‘stupid’, she an assassin of her

people; animal-like metaphors depicted the king as a stubborn donkey, and thequeen as a ‘tigress’ and ‘viper’; poetic verses heaved threats at their rule. Vulgar

sexual attacks in verse and on placards, however, targeted only the queen (four).

She was called a prostitute, her own birth was sullied as illegitimate, and thephrase that would gain greater currency during the years of Revolution – ‘uterine

furies’ – was first pinned on her in 1787.43 What drove such writings and talk in

the two years before the Revolution remains to be explained in this article. 44

Verse and talk maligned the queen and the king more than pamphlets in the

years before the Revolution, yet only three verses and one placard made sexual

charges against her. Imagery was even less polemical and visual pornography was absent. Only in 1789 and after do more lurid images (and tales) of thequeen’s sexual excesses, as well as of an impotent and cuckolded king, appear inthe reworkings of two earlier writings. Three erotic scenes of Marie-Antoinette

embraced by three different lovers appeared in one of the several editions of

Essai historique sur la vie de Marie-Antoinette published after that work was

‘liberated’ from the Bastille in July 1789.45 Similarly, more explicitly porno-graphic images of the queen with a lover, as well as of the king having his

member examined by doctors, appeared in an undated edition of Toinette et

Charlot but which probably dated from after July 1789 when that writing also

emerged from the Bastille. A print often identified as the comte d’Artois fondlingthe queen’s genitalia was clearly pasted into an edition of the same Toinette et

Charlot dated 1779, and a photograph of the same print was added at a later date

to a 1789 edition; that illustration was actually a reverse image of a print known

as ‘Ma Constitution’ depicting Lafayette not with the queen, as so often assumed,

but with Mme Condorcet, which appeared in early 1792.46 The bestializing of


42 Multiple attacks: the king (10), minister Lomenie de Brienne, (9), the queen (8), minister Lamoignon (7) and minister Calonne (3). Single targets: the king (7), Lomenie (5), the queen (5),

Calonne (3) and Lamoignon (2) .43 For these four see Ruault, Gazette d’un Parisien sous la Re volution, p. 97. ‘Satyr sur le GrandMogol’, in BN MS Fr. 6686, Hardy, vii, 27 Nov. 1787, and also in Satyrs, pp. 5–6, where it isattributed to Camille Desmoulins; ‘Chanson d’un batellier de Saint-Cloud, a l’encontre de la damedu lieu’, ibid. pp. 12–14, attributed to ‘J.M. de Chenier’; and ‘Reflexions d’un patriote’, in Raunie,Chansonnier historique, x. 287–95.

44 See section III below.45 Essai historique sur la vie de Marie-Antoinette d’Autriche, reine de France. Pour servir a

l’histoire de cette princesse (1789), BN, Reserve, Enfer 334. These prints may be found in BN,Cabinet des Estampes, Collection de Vinck, 1136, 1137, 1138; de Vinck, 1132 alluding to theillegitimate birth of the dauphin is also from the 1789 edition of the Essai historique. The threeerotic images are reproduced in A. de Baecque, La caricature re volutionnaire (1988), pp. 188–9;

on p. 233 de Baecque cites the date 1789 for the publication of that edition of Essai historique, yeton p. 188 in the text the author inexplicably offers 1784 as the date of publication.46 Les amours de Charlot et Toinette, [s.d.], BN, Reserve, Enfer 654; Charlot et Toinette (1779),

Rouen, BM, Leber 2281 and ibid. (1789), BN, Reserve, Enfer 1593. See C. Langlois, La caricaturecontre-Re volutionnaire (1988), p. 142, for the identification of the print ‘Ma Constitution’; my

warm thanks to Annie Duprat whose deep knowledge of the corpus of caricatures helped me toclarify the provenance of that illustration.



the queen, transformed into a monstrous and exotic ‘harpie’ bearing therecognizable face of Marie-Antoinette, appeared in a print which in one of the

corners has the words ‘Droits de l’Homme’ and ‘Constitution des francais’, thus

dating it after July 1789. The original female ‘harpie’, its face unrecognizable andonly the long blond hair perhaps identifying it with the queen, first appeared in a

pamphlet of 1784 whose polemical thrust in word and image was directed

against the controller-general Calonne.47 At the time of the diamond necklaceaffair in 1785–6, prints of the visages (not always accurate) of all the protagonists

in the trial, but not of the queen, were marketed.48

Negative images of the queen, and also of the king and the ministers,appeared in 1787–8, but they only amount to fourteen in a corpus of political

iconography numbering 147 known so far.49 Perhaps less, for the nouvellistes

of the Metra newsletters and of the Me´

moires secrets doubted that twocaricatures they described actually existed. Whether real or not, one of thesetwo images may have contributed to identifying the queen with the famousexpression ‘let them eat cake’. The scene described, but not actually seen by

the journalists, is of the king drinking (an allusion to the rumours of his

frequent drunkenness), the queen eating, and the people gazing at them with

mouths open or shouting.50 Marie-Antoinette was represented in three other negative images, while Louis appeared or is alluded to in four others. The

queen was grotesquely depicted emerging from a Trojan horse bearing tax

edicts. So too was she, through her image, culpable for the ‘malady’, bleeding,

and the weakness of France embodied in a female figure near death. Andthough her visage was absent in another illustration, the empty space alongsidean image of Louis XVI was figuratively filled by Marie-Antoinette. The king’s

portrait and the queen’s non-portrait constituted additions to a ‘rogues’ gallery’

of kings of France and their evil queens who had brought harm to the French

people. In these illustrations the queen was not alone in being represented asguilty. The former controller-general Calonne assisted her in bleeding and

debilitating France; and her accomplices in launching the tax edicts from atop a


47 The print post-July 1789 may be found in BN, Cabinet des Estampes, De Vinck 1148 and Qb 88B 110299. This print is paired with another, undated and most probably of the Revolutionary period, that bestializes the queen; her face is attached to the body of a leopard and serpentsrepresent the hair. The pamphlet including the print of the female ‘harpie’, whose authorship isattributed to the king’s brother, the comte de Provence, is Description historique d’un monstre symbolique, Pris vivant sur les bords du Lac Fagua, pre s Santa-Fe , par les soins de Francisco Xaveiro de Meunrios, comte de Barcelonne & Vice-roi du Nouveau Mexique. Envoye e par un Ne goiciant du pays a un Parisien; son Ami. A Santa-Fe et se trouve a Paris . . . 1784.

48 Nonetheless one scholar, Andre Blum, ‘L’estampe satirique et la caricature en France au xviiie

siecle’, Gaz Beaux-Arts, 52 (1910), 117, wrote: ‘l’affaire du Collier vint contribuer a designer davantage la reine a la fureur de l’opinion publique, comme en temoigne une serie de caricatures

relatives au cardinal Louis de Rohan, dit ‘‘le cardinal Collier’’’.49 The corpus of political images for the years 1787–8 comes from BN, Cabinet des Estampes; Archives de Paris, D5 B6 1990, ‘Livre de vente . . . de Vallee’; Journal de la Librairie ou Cataloguehebdomadaire, t. xxvi, annee 1787–8; Me moires secrets, xxxiv–xxxv; [Metra], Correspondancelitte raire secrete; Correspondance secrete, ed. Lescure, ii; and BN n.a.f. 17275.

50 Me moires secrets, 27 Aug. 1787, xxxv. 452–3, and [Metra], Correspondance secrete, ii. 174,22 Aug. 1787, and ii. 178, 1 Sept. 1787.



Trojan horse were the royal ministers, Lamoignon, Lomenie de Brienne andBreteuil, the last two rumoured to be her favourites. Members of her entourage

were also visible: her former tutor the abbe de Vermond and her dear friend

the duchesse de Polignac, the latter the main recipient of the queen’s largesse.The king was figuratively criticized for various acts of misrule, including

deception, incompetence and ignorance – the latter represented in a blind-

folded ruler. The image of a half-broken ship was a harsh pictorial judgementon his governance of the state. Yet it was the ministers – Calonne, Brienne and

Lamoignon – who appeared in more caricatures in 1787–8 than either king or

queen, eight in all marking them with ignominy.The iconography deployed against the ministers and the queen, the visual

language more unambiguous than that against the king, was the figurative

counterpart to the idea that served as a constitutional safety valve for theFrench public, who foisted major responsibility for the government’s travails in1787–8 upon the queen and royal ministers, rather than upon the king.51 Their exact responsibility has yet to be explored in this article. The most critical

figurative attack against the persons of the king and the queen – if actually

drawn and not just talk – depicted them as gourmands, filling themselves with

food and drink while indifferent to the hunger or complaints of their subjects. Yet the paucity of negative images, especially of the king and queen, contrasts

with their plentiful supply from 1789 onwards. That very paucity underscores

the prevalence of taboo and tradition. In the iconography of 1787–8, a certain

sanctity continued to veil the images of the sovereigns, formal portraits of themmore numerous than caricatures and still being sold and bought in thecommercial market. And favourable images also appeared, even of the queen,

depicting acts the public approved.

That contrast in the quantity of defamatory writings and imagery of the king

and queen, before 1789 and after 1789, raises the question: were those libelsand illustrations causes or consequences of the Revolution?

I ITales of Marie-Antoinette’s sexual exploits made use of real experiences

superimposed on classic pornographic scenarios: garden walks, dances and the

privacy of Trianon became settings for trysts, liaisons, intrigues and orgies whose delectation for the actors and readers alike was heightened with

titillating graphic detail.52 Reality fed fantasy and fantasy sometimes shaped

reality, but was fantasy read as reality?

Certain images reappeared frequently, embroidered with details that variedand became the stock-in-trade of eighteenth-century writings. A secret meeting

in a grove, described in Essai historique sur la vie de Marie-Antoinette, is alsoa setting in the final act of The marriage of Figaro and was the centrepiece for


51 See pp. 291–5 below.52 D’Almeras, Marie-Antoinette et les pamphlets, pp. 116 n. 1, 201, 205–6, 223ff and

Fleischmann, Les pamphlets libertins, pp. 62ff, 137, 171.



the ‘staged’ meeting of the cardinal and the counterfeit queen that Mme deLamotte’s fertile imagination constructed. So too in Essai historique, the queen

as the older woman seduces a seventeen-year-old boy, as in Beaumarchais’s

play the mature countess Almaviva arouses the passion of the young Cherubin,the two consummating their relationship some years later in La mere coupable.

Common scenarios might become familiar, and readers might become accus-

tomed to recognizing literary strategems; so too might readers become sensitiveto the blurring of distinctions between what was real and what was imagined, as

well as to the overlayers of illusion upon reality.

‘Plausibility’, an integral feature of political pornography according to Jacques Revel, was paired with the mode of excess in the form of satires and

diatribes. The sexually rapacious woman domineering men, a stereotype and

caricature borrowed from the carnavalesque tradition of the ‘world turnedupside down’, took centre-stage. Yet timeless images drawn from an oft-repeated repertoire lose a certain plausibility in becoming trite, as the excessof exaggeration may diminish a sense of reality.53 Did Frenchmen or women

suspect the royal children, the dauphin and the older daughter, of being

bastards? Such a charge appeared in a notorious noel (a set of satirical verses)54

and in a pamphlet, and was alluded to in a speech by the dean of the medicalfaculty during the celebration in Paris of the dauphin’s birth.55 Did readers

believe the tale that the empress Maria-Theresa advised her daughter, Marie-

Antoinette, to take a lover, and so dissemble her lesbianism and bear a child

whose birth would secure her place as queen? How readers respond to their readings is an elusive problem with which historians and literary critics,philosophers and semiologists grapple.56

Lewd or defamatory tales about the queen, if they did not substitute a ‘paper

queen’, in Revel’s apt words, for the real one before 1789, did harm her

reputation, as a newsletter writer stated, and taught the French to lose respectfor her. Yet the manuscript newsletters, which alone could report on such

writings, uniformly adopted a critical voice, characterizing all this ribaldry as

‘horrible’, ‘atrocious’ or ‘abominable’, ‘calumnious’ or ‘reprehensible’, while at

the same time reproducing some of the verse. And long before twentieth-century scholars unveiled the fictitious nature of political pornography, writersof newsletters in the eighteenth century cautioned their readers about the

novelesque, theatrical or mendacious character of political pamphlets in

general, in which the appearance of truth and emotional effect, exaggerated


53 In Jacques Revel’s words, ‘un effet de de -re alisation’. See Revel, ‘Marie-Antoinette in her fictions’, pp. 111–29; the quotation is on p. 126.

54 Emile Littre, ‘Noel’, Dictionnaire de la langue franc aise (1883).55

I want to express my deep gratitude to Eva Keuls, Professor, Department of Classics,University of Minnesota, for translating from Latin the entire speech of the dean of the medicalschool that was reprinted in the Me moires secrets, 29 Nov. 1781, xviii. 152–3.

56 A few examples include: Umberto Eco, ‘ Intentio lectoris: the state of the art’, in The limits of interpretation (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), pp. 44–63; R. Darnton, The kiss of Lamourette:reflections in cultural history (New York, 1990), pp. 131–5; idem, ‘Readers respond to Rousseau’,The Great Cat Massacre, pp. 215–56; and n. 4 above.



imagination and falsehood replaced veracity.57 This ‘pamphletary fiction’, againRevel’s term, replete with ambiguity that lends itself to multiple readings,

might induce historians to ponder whether its fictional character did not dilute

its political impact.58

The provenance of and audience for political pornography and the salacious

gossip that fed the pamphlets further heighten their ambiguity. Rumours about

royalty originated in court circles, in the earlier years reputedly from Louis XV’schancellor Maupeou or foreign minister d’Aiguillon, Louis XVI’s aunts or his

brother Provence, or lesser courtiers; the Saxon ambassador pointed to the

jealousies and ‘cattiness’ of the women of the court. They knew of the queen’snocturnal walks, her dancing partners, the friendships she sought or spurned,

and they were the ones who speculated on the conjugal relationship of the

royal couple; these bits and pieces of information about persons, activities andbehaviour were then embellished and exaggerated in verses, songs and libels. Versifiers in particular were experienced writers of couplets, as the journalistof the Me moires secrets noted about the poet who composed Noel sur la

naissance du dauphin.59

Evidence for the circulation of such talk, songs and writings beyond court

circles to Paris and the provinces, and from aristocrats to lesser subjects, is limitedand impressionistic. The description of the circuit taken by verses – from

Versailles courtier to Parisian artisan and then back to the court – that Darnton

cites is not sociological observation; his source, Le portefeuil d’un talon rouge,

was not an objective and analytical work but one of the notorious pamphlets thatattacked the queen.60 In 1781 manuscript newsletters critical of the royal family

were reported to be circulating in the provinces, and a resident of Dijon who

collected verses of the day included the poem alluding to the dauphin’s illegiti-

mate birth.61 Yet to what extent the authors, printers and booksellers arrested in

1785 and 1786 for scurrilous writings were disseminating their products amongaristocrats or lesser subjects we do not know. Evidence confirms, and also

qualifies, the spread of critical thought and talk about the queen’s involvement in

the diamond necklace affair. Bewilderment and shock at the unexpected turn of

events initially set the public on the side of the cardinal and against the queen. Onemonth after Rohan’s arrest, in September 1785, Axel Fersen reported gossip inParis that Marie-Antoinette was secretly linked with the cardinal in the purchase


57 Me moires secrets, viii. 258–9, xxx. 111, 130, xxxi. 208, 210, xxxii. 60; Correspondancelitte raire secrete, 24 May 1787, p. 192, 19 Apr. 1788, pp. 133–34; and BN MS Fr. 10364, Me moires pour servir a l’histoire de la fin du xviii e siecle, fos. 166 v , 174, 279 v –280.

58 Revel, ‘Marie-Antoinette in her fictions’, p. 129.59 See in particular Me moires secrets, 14 Apr. 1775, xxx. 196–7; 21 Feb. 1776, ix. 48–9; 19 Apr.

1782, xx. 192; 24 Feb.1783, xxii. 102; 23 Dec. 1784, xxvii. 87; 20 Feb., 5 Mar. 1786, xxxi. 118, 147;

8 Aug. 1787, xxxv. 393–4. For the Saxon ambassador’s comment: Les correspondances des agentsdiplomatiques, p. 195. The marquis de Bombelles, Journal , ii. 200, a loyal courtier, was aware of the jealousy and malice of other courtiers towards the queen and her circle of friends.

60 Darnton, The literary underground , p. 201, in an English translation; the original French isreprinted in Revel, ‘Marie-Antoinette in her fictions’, p. 115.

61 Me moires secrets, 29 Jan. 1781, 17:44–45, and BN MS Fr. 12860, Chansons et satireshistoriques, ii, 1715–86, fos. 377–80.



of the necklace and in conspiratorial service for the emperor, her brother; gossipthis time accused the queen of dissembling pregnancy to avert the king’s wrath.62

The Parisian bookseller Hardy further reported that two men were arrested in the

Palais-Royal for their disrepectful talk against the royal couple. Swarms of peoplein Paris bought the judicial memoirs presented for the trial, but in them the lawyer-

writers did not impugn the queen’s name, nor did the manuscript newsletters.

The public avidly accepted Mlle d’Oliva’s claim of innocence, that she did notknow she was impersonating the queen, which implied that the queen too did not

know of the deception carried out in her name.63 So sophisticated a man as

Nicolas Ruault, publisher of Voltaire and Beaumarchais, expressed his belief inmany of these rumours and charges against the queen and recounted with zest

the public’s criticisms, but he rejected allegations of a romantic nocturnal

encounter between Marie-Antoinette and the Cardinal de Rohan. Another contemporary recorded attacks against the queen in muted tones of sadness,expressing surprise at their currency.64 Yet rumours and criticisms varied over time. Once the trial was under way attitudes seem to have changed. Initial

sympathy for Rohan turned to derision as the public learned of the cardinal’s

gullibility and collusion in the schemes of Mme de Lamotte. Following the trial

another reversal set in. The king’s order exiling Rohan to his convent in Auvergneafter the Parlement of Paris had exonerated him brought renewed public

sympathy for the cardinal and criticism of the queen.

The years 1787 and 1788 brought more numerous attacks against Marie-

Antoinette that were also more popular in character and engaged more of thepublic. Hardy reported people distributing manuscript copies of the furiouspoem ‘Satyr sur le Grand Mogul’, and groups gathering and reciting it by

memory.65 A critical letter appeared in a newspaper, and manuscript newsletters

reported more expressions of hostility in deed as well as word – vulgar outcries

and violent acts on the streets of Paris and on the road between Paris and Versailles, some for the first time. A crowd attempted to burn the queen’s effigy,

which the Paris police chief thwarted in time. But they did burn the effigy of her

friend, the duchesse de Polignac; and a lady-in-waiting of the queen narrowly

escaped physical attack. Two travelling students arriving in the city of Troyesimprovised a puppet show whose Commedia dell’arte characters mockingly alluded to the queen’s encouraging the king to drink.66


62 Axel Fersen to Gustavus III of Sweden, 9 Sept. 1785, in A. Soderhjelm, Fersen et Marie- Antoinette: correspondance et journal intime ine dits du comte Axel de Fersen (1930), p. 107.

63 Me moires secrets, 23 March 1786, xxxi. 184.64 Ruault, Gazette d’un Parisien sous la Re volution, pp. 29, 49, 68, 70–1, 77–8, 80–1, 86, 88,

90, 96–8, 100–1, 125–6, 152, provides a number of examples of popular sentiment against Marie- Antoinette; and BN MS Fr. 10364, Me moires pour servir a l’histoire de la fin du xviii e siecle, fos.

282r

, 299 v

, 305r

–306 v

, 321r

.65 BN MS Fr. 6686, Hardy, vii, 27 Nov. 1787.66 [Metra], Correspondance litte raire secrete, 10 Aug. 1788, no. 33, p. 278; and BN MS Fr. 10364,

Me moires pour servir a l’histoire de la fin du xviii e siecle, fos. 299 v , 305 v –306r , 321r . Axel Fersenreported and rebutted the rumour of the queen encouraging the king to drink; see letter to GustavusIII, 27 Dec. 1787, in Soderhjelm. Fersen et Marie-Antoinette, p. 113. On the puppet show in Troyes:

A[rchives] D[epartementales,] Cote-d’Or, E. 642, letters of Godard to Cortot, 26 July 1788, no. 44.



Many of the scandalous tales clearly conveyed aristocratic venom againstMarie-Antoinette, but these criticisms and complaints impinged little on the

lives of ordinary French men and women. Courtiers jested about the royal

couple’s lack of offspring in their first years of marriage. Other subjects –Parisian market women, a Catholic confraternity, Protestants, Jews, Masons,

students in the provinces – were seriously concerned about a problem that

was an affair of state, the succession to the throne. They hopefully awaitedroyal issue, and joyously celebrated the birth of the dauphin; even the future

member of the Committee of Public Safety, Collot d’Herbois, wrote a play on

the occasion of the dauphin’s birth expressing his devotion to the royal family,and in particular to the queen.67 Who but courtiers or aristocrats would be

enraged that the queen ignored court etiquette on her visits to Paris, or chose

ladies-in-waiting or dancing partners among those who were not from theoldest families?68 They felt aggrieved because excluded from the small circle of the queen’s friends and from the largesse such proximity yielded. But thepublic at large might not have objected that the queen permitted ordinary

subjects to walk in royal gardens amid courtiers and royalty.69 Hidden in this

literature of scandal may be a class bias that diminished its appeal to a broad

public before 1789. If social groups respond with different behaviour to thesame experience, and if publishers alter texts for audiences of different social


67 La Loge ‘La Paix’ a l’O de Tarbes et la Naissance du Dauphin 1781 (Lourdes, 1970); Discours a l’occasion de la naissance de Monseigneur le Dauphin, prononce dans la Loge duContrat Social, Mere Loge du Rite Ecossois, a l’Orient de Paris, par le F. Abbe B***, Avocat auParlement et Orateur de la L. (1781); L’abbe Brival, Les Voeux du Colle ge de Tulle pour monseigneur le Dauphin. Discours prononce dans l’Eglise du Colle ge le XXII De cembre 1781.Suivi de la relation de ce qu’on y a fait pour ce le brer la Naissance de Monseigneur le Dauphin.(Tulle, 1781); [F. Marin Gamas, student of rhetoric at the College des Graffins], Epıtre aux Franc ¸ais sur la naissance du Dauphin (1781); Prieres faites pour l’heureuse de livrance de la Reine,re cite es en Hebreu depuis le 15 Fevrier 1785, dans l’Assemble e des Juifs de la Nation Espagnoleet Portugaise, re sidans a Paris, par ordre du Sieur Silvetra, syndic et agent ge ne ral de cette Nation (1785). The rhetorical and ritualized aspects of these pronouncements should not be

overlooked, yet a certain degree of authenticity should also not be discounted. On Collot d’Herboissee Celestin Hippeau, Le gouvernement de Normandie au xvii e et au xviii e siecles. D’Apre s lacorrespondance ine dite des marquis de Beuvron et des ducs d’Harcourt, gouverneurs et lieutenants ge ne raux de cette province. Extrait des Me moires de l’Acade mie des Sciences, Arts et Belles-Lettres de Caen (Caen, 1862), pp. 20–1. In addition see Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret, Anecdotes du re gne de Louis XVI (1780), pp. 152–75. In the volume of 1791, Nougaret contendsthat his three earlier volumes (1776, 1778, 1780) contained only material favourable to thegovernment because of the constraints of censorship, yet in the 1791 edition there is no criticism of the king and queen although he does criticize Necker, Calonne and even the excesses in pamphletsagainst the sovereigns.

68 That Marie-Antoinette detested the formality of court etiquette and preferred a more informalfamily life is made clear in her letters: see Correspondance ine dite de Marie-Antoinette, ed. le

comte Paul Vogt (1864), passim.69 Me moires secrets, 29 Sept. and 2 Oct. 1775, xxxii. 313–4; 20 Sept., 14 Nov., 2 Dec. 1775, viii.188–9, 259–61, 275; 6 Mar. 1776, ix. 61–2; 4 Mar., 26 May 1778, xi. 131, 235; 8 Oct. 1777, x. 242; 1Oct. 1778, xii. 123; 7–10 Feb. 1779, xiii. 276–9; 9 Sept. 1779, xiv. 178; Oct., Nov. and Dec. 1781,xviii. 95–7, 100–3, 107, 113, 123–4, 126–8, 130–1, 140, 148–9, 204–5; 16, 19 Jan., 4 Feb. 1782, xx.49–50, 54–5, 62; 29 Feb. 1784, xxv. 139; 6 Oct. 1785, xix. 254; and Correspondance secrete, ed.Lescure, i. 233.



character, so too social groups may read the same texts yet draw differentmeanings.70

Just as public responses to the queen were multiple, so the image of Marie-

Antoinette in manuscript newsletters was multiple, both negative and positive.She was a moral, human and beneficent figure. The queen appeared as the

upholder of proper norms of behaviour in the court; a responsible mother who

personally undertook the education of her daughter; a benefactor of the poor and unfortunate, however much a journalist judged her contributions to

charity a mere ‘drop in the water’; and especially as a patron of the arts and of

artists and writers.71 Her refusal to conform to court etiquette introducedgreater ease and familiarity among courtiers and with the public, behaviour

which projected a more ‘democratic’ image of a sovereign willing to walk and

talk with everyone she met. The royal couple strolling hand in hand in the park of Versailles under the eye of the public gave visual expression to thesentimental bonds between husband and wife that formed the new mores. It

was widely written at the time of the diamond necklace affair that the king and

queen had refused a few years earlier to buy that necklace, both reportedly

expressing a sentiment sure to gain popular sympathy: ‘We have more need of

ships than of necklaces.’ Once past her thirtieth birthday, Marie-Antoinetteassumed greater sobriety of dress and manner.72 Contemporaries may have

read those details with scepticism as a public relations effort from Versailles, in

the same way that the public gave no credence to reports in the Gazette de

France and to news bulletins that the police circulated, accepting criticismmore readily than praise, as the former lieutenant-general of police lamented.73

Only the applause, shouts or silence that greeted the queen on the streets or in


70 Ruault, Gazette d’un Parisien sous la Re volution, p. 96, conveys a sense of this socialdifferentiation in his description of the public displeasure manifested against the comte d’Artois,known for his support of strong royal measures, when he arrived at the Cour des Aides in August1787 to demand registration of the land and stamp taxes: ‘He was the target of insults and curses

from the rabble assembled on the streets. They threw objects on his carriage, crying ‘‘to the wolves,to Bicetre [a Paris prison], the pimp of the queen!’’ Respectable people, who neither talk nor act asdo the rabble, think basically alike.’ For a theoretical discussion of socially differentiated modes of comportment, especially of reading: M. de Certeau, The practice of everyday life (Berkeley, Calif.,1984), pp. 165–76.

71 Jeanne Arnaud-Bouteloup, Marie-Antoinette et l’art de son temps (Strasbourg, 1924) offers asomewhat excessive appreciation of the queen’s relationship to the various arts.

72 Correspondance secrete, ed. Lescure, i. 168, 181, 209, 245, ii. 85, 568; Me moires secrets, 9Feb., 13 Mar., 21 Apr., 27 Aug. 1774, vii. 126–7, 143, 162–3, 209–10; 26 Apr., 24 July, 5, 8 Dec.1775, viii. 13, 124–5, 278–9; 19 Oct. 1775, xxxii. 324; 1 Aug., 17, 21 Sept., 4, 9 Nov. 1776, ix. 177,216–17, 220, 248, 254; 9 Nov. 1777, x. 275; 19 Feb. 1778, xi. 109; 13 Jan., 17 Mar., 3 May 1783,xxii. 30–1, 150–1, 258; 31 Jan., 6 Feb. 1784, xxv. 74, 84; 25 May 1774, xxvii. 230; 27 Feb. 1785,

xxviii. 150–1; 12 Aug. 1785, xix. 164–5; 2 Dec. 1785, xxx. 90; 16 Mar. 1786, xxxi. 170. Nougaretemphasizes the queen’s (and king’s) ‘bienfaisance’: Anecdotes du re gne de Louis XVI (1776),pp. 7, 9, 12, 15, 130, 134; (1778), passim; (1780), pp. 152, 184–5.

73 BM Orleans MS 1442, ‘Memoires de . . . Le Noir . . .’, fos. 304r–v –305r . Le Noir’s me moire was written some years later, the lapse of time blurring his memory of events so that his reference tomounting public criticism of the queen cannot be precisely dated to before or during theRevolution.



the theatres of Paris offer testimony, and over the years applause became lessfrequent.

I I I

Lynn Hunt and Sarah Maza argue that obscene attacks portraying Marie-

Antoinette engaged in immoral sexual acts expressed an underlying male fear

that female dominance was displacing masculine representations of authority.74

A counter-image of Louis XVI as impotent, a cuckold and a drunkard, adding up

to imbecility (all but the first the result of the queen’s machinations), revealedsimilar fears. Yet immediately following the diamond necklace affair the

residents of Normandy publicly demonstrated their attachment to the king

when he made an exceptional visit to the province in 1786. That outpouring of popular affection for him, which deeply impressed contemporary observers,

may reveal a further disjuncture in public opinion between Versailles and Paris

on the one side and provincial France on the other side.75 The topos of the

rapacious female that persists over the centuries and still reverberates today had undoubted force, yet it must be placed within a broader context.

The queen was not alone the target of mud-slinging, nor the sole person heldresponsible for weakening monarchical authority. The comte d’Artois, the

king’s brother, the presumed sexual partner of Marie-Antoinette in writings

such as Charlot et Toinette (especially during the Revolution), became theagent of cuckoldry and incest. Royal ministers also appear in pamphlets andpoems as immoral creatures. Lomenie de Brienne merely stole from the royal

treasury, whereas Calonne milked it dry and created a deficit in order to provide luxuries for himself and his mistresses and engage in debauchery. Another

minister usurped a family inheritance for his own use. Heinous crimes – the

minister Lamoignon’s plan to poison his mother, the queen’s intrigues topoison the ministers Necker and Vergennes and the comte de Lamotte (husband

of the perpetrator of the diamond necklace affair), her efforts to keep the king

in drunken stupor and usurp his crown – injected a note of melodramaticexcess into the slander-mongering.76 Moral rot was generalized, and thus all themore banal.


74 Hunt, The family romance of the French Revolution, pp. 113–23, and Maza, Private livesand public affairs, pp. 167–211.

75 De Baecque, The body politic , pp. 29–51 for the defamation of Louis XVI. For descriptions andresponses to his trip to Normandy: Me moires secrets, xxxii. 2–3, 7, 9, 15, 149–52, 158–60, 165–7,176–7; [Metra], Correspondance litte raire secrete, no. 28, 1 July 1786, no. 29, 8 July 1786, no. 33, 5

Aug. 1786; and [Le Tellier], Voyage de Louis XVI dans sa province de Normandie (1824 [orig. written 1786]).

76

The charges against the controller general Calonne are plentiful in all the nouvelles a la main. Le Diable dans un be nitier , one of the London libels of the early 1780s, and Robiquet, The veneaude Morande, p. 81, cite Les Amours du visir de Vergennes and Les Petits Soupers et les nuits del’hotel de Bouillon (1783), of which only the latter, directed against the minister of the marine, themarechal de Castries, is in the BN. For Lamoignon’s poisoning plan see BN MS Fr. 6686, Hardy, vii,11 Sept. 1788, and for the charge of poisoning Vergennes see Ruault, Gazette d’un Parisien sous la Re volution, 21 Feb. 1787, pp. 80–1.



Some scholars suggest that pornography was more commonplace and lessshocking in the eighteenth than in later centuries.77 As a perennial tradition it

was the repository of a substratum of human consciousness, ranging from an

easier acceptance of bodily functions to male (and sometimes female) lust andfear of the female. Such archetypes may explain in part why, in the form of

political pornography, these emotions were impressed at particular times

upon particular individuals. Archetypes may also be infused with a particular historical situation and propelled by a particular historical moment. Gender

alone does not explain why Marie-Antoinette became a figure of scandal in

political libels. Pornography, which masked moralism in lubricity and raisedissues of gender, was also a signpost to elemental political sentiments. Its

political content may provide a key not only to perennial fears, but also to

contemporary opinion. Public hostilities gave vitality to stock formulae, whilepornographic or scandalous diatribes incorporated political messages.78

Political pornography was a genre of political criticism, as Lynn Hunt rightly argues,79 embracing slander, scandal and vicious political diatribes. Multiple

forces drove that criticism and gave it an appeal. ‘Pornography’ in that broad

sense defamed character; lowering the repute of the individual reverberated

on everything and everyone associated with that person. ‘Pornography’ alsopersonalized complex problems of government by impugning the acts of indi-

viduals, simplifying issues otherwise difficult to explain and grasp – in the

tradition of popular literature – and providing the illusion of understanding

along with the targets of animus. In addition to images and individuals, under-lying political arguments engaged the interests and concerns of a broad public.The queen, and even more so the ministers, appear as guilty of political as of

moral misdeeds. These charges highlight problems of policy, or of individual

actions believed to influence government policy, that affected the public. A

litany of wrongful acts added up to the gravest crime: the queen and theministers were usurping the king’s authority and weakening the monarchy by


77

P. Wagner, Eros revived: erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (1988), andHunt, The invention of pornography, pp. 9–45.78 Chaussinand-Nogaret, La vie quotidienne des femmes du roi , T. E. Kaiser, ‘Louis le Bien-Aime

and the rhetoric of the royal body’, in Embodying power in seventeenth and eighteenth century France, ed. S. E. Melzer and K. Norberg (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), pp. 131–61, and idem, ‘Madame dePompadour and the theaters of power’, Fr Hist Stud , 19 (1996), 1025–44, show how similar sexualslander targeted one after another of the wives and mistresses of kings at least since the fifteenth century, indeed as far back as Eleanor of Aquitaine in the twelfth century (for the latter, I refer toPeggy McCracken, ‘Scandalous stories about Eleanor of Aquitaine: the king’s rule and the queen’sdesire’, paper delivered at the colloquium ‘Prerogatives of Rule in Early Modern France: Royal

Women from Catherine de Medicis to Marie-Antoinette’, 12–13 Nov. 1999, Amherst College, Amherst, Mass.). The eighteenth century continued an earlier practice but within the new context

of a broader reading public, which probably gave such writings greater publicity. For these reasonsI have reservations about Maza’s argument ( Private lives and public affairs, pp. 167–73) thatRousseau’s influence in promoting the image of the ‘good’ woman as the domesticated private wifeand mother spurred the criticisms in the late eighteenth century of the ‘public’ political womanrepresented by the queen; ironically Marie-Antoinette herself sought a more private and family life,for which purpose she defied court etiquette and was much criticized.

79 Hunt, The invention of pornography, pp. 35–45.



alienating the subjects’ love for the king. While defamation of the queen andministers reverberated against all associated with them, including the king,

attacks on them also deflected public criticism from the king. The queen and

ministers were political ‘lightning rods’ and constitutional ploys. Subjects could vent their dissatisfaction with the government and its policies, targeting those

closest to the king whom they held responsible for the public’s ills, while

affirming their ‘love’ of the king, meaning their allegiance to the existingsystem of government. The preservation of monarchical government was

unquestioned even as its policies and agents were challenged.

The queen’s major transgressions were threefold: she secretly promoted theinterests of her native Austria against those of France; she wasted public money

by extravagant spending on herself and her friends; and she sought office and

influence for her favourites.

80

The ‘Austrian connection’ touched on recessesof collective historical memory, age-old fears of the Habsburg enemy-turned-ally, whose friendship the French public did not easily accept and whoserelationship to France they suspected. As the embodiment of the new alliance

and the close friend of its architect, the duc de Choiseul, Marie-Antoinette was

the focus of suspicions and hostility. These ranged from the benign to the

malevolent: naming the queen ‘l’Autrichienne’, and Trianon, her favouritepalace, ‘Vienna’; charging her with financial collusion, secretly sending govern-

ment funds to her brother, the emperor; and accusing her of betrayal,

promoting the emperor’s plan to divide French territory with the British.

Elaborations on this tale made the duc de Choiseul, architect of the Habsburgalliance, her putative father, while the Cardinal de Rohan, former ambassador to Vienna, appeared in this scenario as the secret emissary between Habsburg

brother and sister. Such thoughts and talk, fabrications of imagination, were

not true. Still verbal theatre of the absurd before 1789, these accusations later

gained greater credibility and turned into fatal attacks during the Revolution.True, but unknown to the public, was the heavy pressure tantamount to

emotional blackmail that her mother, her brother and their ambassador in

France actually imposed on the queen to exert influence over French foreign

policy on behalf of Habsburg interests. At the same time they criticized her ineffectiveness, for Louis and his foreign minister Vergennes repeatedly ignored or rebuffed Marie-Antoinette’s initiatives. What was unequivocally

clear to contemporaries was the policy of the emperor Joseph II. His efforts to

acquire Bavaria (1778) and to open the Scheldt river to navigation and

commerce in the Low Countries (1779), and his engagement in war against theOttoman Turks (1783), long-time allies of France, were seen to disrupt the


80

Already in 1783 and 1785 the marquis de Bombelles , Journal , i. 233, 236, ii. 23, noted thequeen’s influence in appointing ministers and also her support for Austrian policy. In December 1784 Ruault, Gazette d’un Parisien sous la Re volution, p. 49, also commented bitterly on thequeen’s intrigues for her brother which he, and he claimed the public, viewed as virtual treachery.Only in July 1788 did Bombelles, Journal , ii. 211, 213–14, give evidence of the public’s criticism of the queen’s expenses, as well of her growing influence in government with her attendance atministerial committees; even so loyal a courtier as Bombelles joined in the latter criticism.



balance of power and peace in Europe. Joseph’s actions heightened traditionalFrench anti-Austrian sentiment, particularly among those originally opposed to

the alliance, that animosity inevitably reverberating against the queen, who was

believed to be supporting her brother’s ambitions.81

Criticism of the queen’s prodigality and friendships had, from the beginning

of the reign, a stronger basis in fact than did charges of her advancing Habsburg

interests against France.82 Her spendthrift ways and favouritism, in particular,impinged on the interests of all the French, who came to believe that such

behaviour drained the royal treasury and inflated their tax burden. In the

critical years 1787–8, when the crown revealed to the French the largegovernment deficit and debt – for which the king requested new and, it was

believed, higher taxes – verses, songs, posters and caricatures denounced the

queen’s love of money. Sovereign in name though not in deed, she was heldresponsible for current ills. One can date exactly the eruption of criticism,indeed of vicious writings and sayings, against the queen and also the king:

August 1787, the month in which the Parlement of Paris refused to register

and sanction the proposed land tax and stamp tax, and the crown sent the

magistrates into provincial exile. Taxes, the deficit and arbitrary government

action against the magistrates were a potent mix that raised the public temper against the government and targeted the queen, as well as the king and past

and present ministers. Anger at her wasteful expenditure on luxuries and

friends, like belief in her secret channelling of money to her brother, the

emperor, led to the conviction that she was the cause of the deficit that forcedthe crown to seek new and higher levies on taxpayers. ‘Mme Deficit’ was her new sobriquet (and during the Revolution ‘Mme Veto’), the public identifying

her with a highly objectionable policy. This more heated political atmosphere

stirred up renewed interest in the me moires on the diamond necklace affair.

Earlier that year in February 1787, just prior to the opening of the Assembly of Notables and the revelation of a deficit, a nouvelliste wrote of public

indifference to that affair, but by the summer demand for writings on it brought

astronomical prices. The abbe Duret, writing in Lyon, reported that the two

volumes of me moires were selling for 25 louis (the equivalent of 800 livres )and could be obtained on loan for 60 livres – prices so high, one may surmise,as to deter actual readership.83 The queen also became a featured figure in


81 For the close link between Austrian diplomacy and growing criticism of the queen: J. Arnaud-Bouteloup, Le role politique de Marie-Antoinette (1924); I wish to thank the anonymous reader

who urged that I consult this book. A more extended study of anti-Austrian sentiment among theFrench may be found in T. E. Kaiser, ‘Who’s afraid of Marie-Antoinette?: Diplomacy, Austrophobiaand the queen’, Fr Hist , 14 (2000), 241–71.

82

On Marie-Antoinette’s ties and favouritism to the Polignac clan: R. A. W. Browne, ‘Court andcrown: rivalry at the court of Louis XVI and its importance in the formation of a pre-Revolutionary aristocratic opposition’, unpub. D.Phil. diss. (Oxford University, 1991), pp. 186–236.

83 Nouvelle a la main to the duc d’Harcourt, 17 Feb. 1787, in Le gouvernement de Normandieau xvii e et au xviii e siecle, ed. C. Hippeau, 9 vols., iv: Paris et Versailles Journal anecdotique de1762 a 1789 (1869), p. 295; and l’abbe Duret, Nouvelles ge ne rales et en particulier de Lyon, BMLyon t. 2, MS 805 fo. 240 v .



political iconography, with all four caricatures depicting her appearing in August and September. Marie-Antoinette atop the Trojan horse dispensing tax

edicts was the most direct reference to the government’s tax measures and the

exiling of the magistrates to the city of Troyes. Fearful of a public display of opposition, the king ordered the queen not to go to the theatre in Paris. When

the salon at the Louvre opened in August, the crown momentarily considered

not exhibiting the new family portrait of the queen and her children by Elisabeth Vigee le Brun, fearing an ‘outraged’ popular reaction. It quickly

reversed course and, according to a review in the Me moires secrets, a ‘mul-

titude’ of people viewed the painting with no discernible hostility.84

Criticism continued in spurts thereafter, in close tandem to the unfolding of

events. The king’s appearance before the Parlement on 19 November 1787,

his insistence on the registration of royal loans against the objections of magistrates, and the subsequent exile of the duc d’Orleans and two magistrates who criticized the king’s decision, brought a resurgence of venomousoutbursts against both queen and king. Disillusioned with his ministers, whose

policies brought upon him one crisis after another, Louis began to turn to the

queen as his most loyal confidante and the intermediary with his ministers,

thus lending credence to the belief in her sinister influence. Marie-Antoinette,Fersen wrote in December 1787, was blamed for all the ills of France, including

the king’s supposed drinking.85 More furious attacks exploded against the

queen and the entire government – the king and the two ministers, Lomenie

de Brienne and Lamoignon – following the May edicts of 1788 and the forciblesuppression of the Parlements, a policy the queen did in fact support.86

Verses, songs and sayings again blamed the queen’s spendthrift ways for the

government’s excessive spending and the resulting deficit, which culminated in

the suppression of the courts. Her responsibility for the deficit was also ascribed

to her secret transfer of money – French money, indeed the entire royaltreasury – to Joseph II.87 Although caricatures vilified Lomenie and Lamoignon

all the way to their resignation and disgrace – and their figurative descent into

hell – the actual suppression of the courts produced no images against the

queen.


84 See the account in Me moires secrets, xxxvi. 347–56, ‘Premiere lettre sur les peintures,sculptures et gravures exposees au salon du Louvre, le 25 aout 1787’.

85 Fersen to Gustavus III, 27 Dec. 1787, in Soderhjelm, Fersen et Marie-Antoinette, p. 113.86 For Marie-Antoinette’s ‘political role’: J. Hardman, French politics 1774–1789 from the

accession of Louis XVI to the fall of the Bastille (1995), pp. 198–215; M. Price, Preserving themonarchy: the comte de Vergennes, 1774–1787 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 145–237; and idem, The fall of the French monarchy Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette and the baron de Breteuil (2002), pp. 7–17.

87 Nouvelles a la main to the duc d’Harcourt, 30 Aug., 5 Sept., 17 Oct. 1788 in Le gouvernement de Normandie au xvii e et au xviii e siecle, iv. 356, 364, 369–70, the last nouvelle of October also reporting accusations of the queen’s responsibility for the crisis in silk manufacturing;and AN Ba 3 (1) C no. 55, 12 Jan. 1789.



Public attitudes were ambivalent. Venom flowed from the belief that Marie- Antoinette exerted a nefarious influence in government through her support of

Austrian interests and the ambitions of her friends, the Polignac family, and

hated ministers, notably Calonne and Lomenie de Brienne. No criticism arose when the queen supported ministers and policies that the public favoured: the

initial appointment of Brienne in 1787; the reappointment of the idolized

Jacques Necker in 1788; and the decision to ‘double’ the number of repre-sentatives of the tiers e tat to the Estates General of 1789, giving the third estate

representation equal to that of the nobility and clergy combined. In an address

of gratitude to the king following the Re sultat , the third estate of Bordeauxeven emoted on how ‘touched’ they were to learn that ‘the august Companion

of your destiny shared this beautiful triumph of your popular virtues . . .’,

whereas in Paris, a letter writer confided to a minister, some continued tobelieve in the queen’s turpitude.88 Politics more than her person determinedthe public’s response. The political choices the queen actually or reputedly made, refracted through her public comportment and her preferences for

persons and policies, fed the fury of vilification in the obscene attacks on her

gender, and politics directly connected ‘pornography’ in its broad sense to

public opinion.Perception distorted reality in what contemporaries wrote about Marie-

Antoinette and in what they believed about her. What may we discern? As

exaggeration flowed from scandal-mongers and still affects historians’ judgement

about pre-1789 libelles, so too the queen’s engagement in politics tends to beoverdrawn in historical writings. A common and undisputed consensus amonghistorians is that the king purposely distanced Marie-Antoinette from ‘la

politique’, the pre-eminent government sphere of foreign affairs. Yet counter

to the tradition established by Louis XIV, Louis XVI permitted his wife to dispense

patronage: to name individuals to positions at court, and to military, ecclesiasticaland diplomatic posts. The queen’s influence over the appointment and dismissal

of ministers, and through those acts over government policy, is however more

debatable. Interpretations in this regard are still coloured by the bias and

myopia in the talk and writings of many of Marie-Antoinette’s contemporaries.Thanks to the new British school of historians we now know much more aboutthe inner workings and machinations of the ministry and the court, which were

two distinct though sometimes overlapping institutions. Yet these same works at

times overplay the queen’s impact on government, especially before 1787 and in

1787–8.89 Marie-Antoinette was not alone in determining decisions on which


88 Contemporary sources seem to indicate that before 1787 Marie-Antoinette mainly used her influence to gain appointments of secondary importance for her favourites, but that in 1787–8 she

influenced the appointment – or resignation – of major figures, that is, of ministers (also see above,n. 80). AN Ba 22 (1), liasse 35, dossier 1, no. 6, fo. 1 v , Third Estate of Bordeaux, ‘Au Roi’, January 1789; AN Ba 3 (1) C no. 55, letter of a Parisian to a minister, 12 Jan. 1789. Ruault, Gazette d’un Parisien sous la Re volution, 31 Jan. 1789, pp. 123–4 and 24 Feb. 1789, p. 126, also offers evidenceof how swiftly public opinion turned favourable, to the king, in response to a desired policy, the‘doubling’ of third estate representation.

89 See notes 82 and 86 above.



ministers were to go or to be appointed; other ministers, and the king’s twobrothers, also played their parts in shaping royal policy.90 And much neglected

in these accounts is the role of the public and the influence of public opinion.

If Marie-Antoinette initiated Necker’s return as minister in August 1788, she didso under the impulse of subjects outraged by the government’s financial crisis.

Before, and especially after 1787, different groups in French society exerted

their influence over government decisions, while increasingly heedless of factual veracity, most often unknown to them, about the queen’s involvement

in government affairs.

Marie-Antoinette’s ‘many bodies’, in Lynn Hunt’s phrase, have ‘many readings’: from the real to the fictional; varying between courtiers and ordinary

French men and women, and among those living in Versailles, Paris and the

provinces; and shifting between slanderous smears and political attacks. Thecharges of sexual licentiousness and moral depravity made against the queenduring the Revolution originated in the last years of the ancien re gime, yetthe effect of scandalous writings in bringing about the Revolution remains

questionable; many layers of hyperbole in historical writing on that issue still

obscure our understanding. The presence of political criticism in pamphlets,

verse, placards, ‘bad talk’ and iconography strongly suggests that fears of financial waste, high taxes and foreign powers aroused the French more than

the purported sexual antics of Marie-Antoinette and her many putative lovers.91

Politics – meaning the policies that government pursued, that individuals

were identified with, and that much of the public opposed – provided theoccasion and the context for ‘pornography’ and scandal to issue as vehiclesof attack. Politics brought forth, directed and gave force to ‘pornography’.

Without the political animus, ‘pornography’ would have been no more than

‘bad books’ hidden ‘under the cloak’ or ‘philosophical books’ disguised in

publishers’ catalogues.

I V

According to Robert Darnton, the French periodically turned to a ‘metatext’,‘narrative frame’ or ‘political folklore’, through which they viewed their rulers

in glaring acts of moral dissoluteness, and whose effect was to ‘[wear] away the

layer of sacredness that made the monarchy legitimate in the eyes of its


90 See Arnaud-Bouteloup, Le role politique de Marie-Antoinette, pp. 179–80; yet however restrained the author’s judgments are, on p. 182 she concludes that the desire to deprive the queenof the means of ruining the kingdom ‘aboutissait tout naturellement a celui de controler l’admini-stration royale. Il faut donc admettre que l’impopularite de M-A a acheve de discrediter la royaute,hate la chute de l’ancien regime, et qu’on peut considerer la fille de Marie-Therese comme ‘‘une des

causes immediates de la Re volution.’’ ’91 Changing political conditions altered the focus of criticism of the queen. In the two yearsbefore the outbreak of Revolution, when high taxes and the government’s deficit were in theforefront of public concern, criticism of the queen’s profligacy and favouritism to her friendsoutdistanced criticism of her Habsburg partisanship. As France neared to and became engaged in

war, criticism of her conspiratorial involvement with Austria gained primacy; see Kaiser, ‘Who’safraid of Marie-Antoinette?’, pp. 262–71.



subjects’.92 The logic implicit in this argument extends as well to the reign of Louis XVI, when tales of scandal acquired political force that helped to instigate

the Revolution. Historical evidence, however, does not provide unambiguous

confirmation of this theory. After 1789, once the Revolution had begun, salacious, even pornographic

writings, talk and imagery proliferated. Before 1789 the historical picture is

much less clear. The volume of such material in the form of pamphlets, versesand songs was relatively thin and the iconography almost non-existent. Their

dissemination over wide areas beyond Versailles and Paris, and among

significant numbers of the French beyond courtiers and aristocrats, remainsunknown. What was read, seen or heard was not necessarily believed in all its

lubricious detail. One is tempted to conclude (much as Roger Chartier argued

that the Revolution made the Enlightenment into its cause)

93

that a reverserelationship existed: pornography was the result rather than the cause of theRevolution. Pornographic images and words, in particular against Marie-

Antoinette, should not be retrospectively transposed to earlier years and

turned into a motor of revolution, though with one important qualification.

Attacks in word and image against the queen, and also against the king and

his ministers, did intensify in the summer of 1787, a period that has becomeknown as the ‘pre-Revolution’ but which was in essence the first stage of the

Revolution itself. Yet salacious attacks were but froth, propelled and nourished

by mounting political controversy. Amidst the surge of pamphlet writing that

began in 1787, and reached one thousand or more during the two years 1787–8, pamphlets dealing with financial and political issues far outnumbered

writings that engaged in personal mud-slinging.94 Much of this material is

extraneous to the sources that Darnton uses, which were thinning out by the

late 1780s. And a further distinction must be made: ‘decadence’ and ‘despotism’

were not synonymous, nor was the former perceived as the single or even themain cause of the latter.95 ‘Decadence’ expressed a moral judgement and

‘despotism’ was a political charge; while the two might overlap, the main

components and targets of the attacks against ‘despotism’ were government


92 Darnton, The forbidden best-sellers, p. 216.93 R. Chartier, The cultural origins of the French Revolution (Durham, N.C., 1991), pp. 67–91.94 As one measure of computation, the Catalogue de l’histoire de France, the entries listed in the

Lb39 series of contemporary writings number 219 for 1787 and 821 for 1788. For a similar calculation see A. de Baecque, ‘Pamphlets: libel and political mythology’, in Revolution in print:the press in France 1775–1800, ed. R. Darnton and D. Roche (New York, 1989), pp. 165–76.

Additional pamphlets may be found under other serial listings and in other libraries. R. W.Greenlaw, Jr, The French nobility on the eve of the Revolution: a study of its aims and attitudes,1787–89 (thesis, Princeton University, 1952; University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Mich.), pp. 67,124–5, 131–2, 179–80, 220–1, calculates a total of 1,494 pamphlets published between 1 Jan. 1787

and 31 Dec. 1788. J. D. Popkin and D. Van Kley, ‘The pre-Revolutionary debate’, section 5, The French Revolution Research Collection, ed.-in-chief C. Lucas (Oxford, 1990), cite a later figure thanGreenlaw provided – 2,179 pamphlets between Jan. 1787 and Jan. 1789 – without indicating thebase for this calculation. R. Birn, ‘The pamphlet press and the Estates General of 1789’, The press inthe French Revolution, p. 60, calculating multiple copies of published pamphlets, arrives at a figureof ‘four million pieces of commentary’ for the period May 1788–May 1789.

95 Darnton, The forbidden best-sellers, pp. 241–2.



policies that affected the French public and government action againstopponents. Attacks against royal or ministerial sexuality were weapons in the

onslaught against ‘ministerial despotism’. Scandal-mongers drew from the body

of public outrage to sell their wares, which transmuted political problems intomoral licentiousness. Darnton is not unaware of this fact, for in the final pages

of The forbidden best-sellers, once he approaches 1787, his focus and language

shift from immoral tales and moral opprobrium to the politics of taxes, Parlements and public opinion.

Let this at least be clearly affirmed: neither the titillation of sex nor dismay

over moral dissoluteness turned the French against their queen, their king,their ministers and their government. That ‘folklore’ embellished, but did not

direct nor dominate the debate. ‘Political pornography’ was a handmaiden to

politics, following in its path, an instrument in a preceding and larger politicalcombat. The ‘turn’ from politics to pornography should now ‘return’ us to thepolitical, to the writings – books, pamphlets, libels – which bore on events of the day and focused the public’s attention. Writers responded to, and wrote

about the problems of government which concerned more and more of the

French people. Prior to a ‘metatext’, indeed to any text, was the lived exper-

ience of the souring relationship between absolute monarchy and its subjects.There was palpable concern over mounting deficits, debt and taxes, the per-

ceived arbitrariness and despotic character of the crown’s efforts at over-

coming these problems, and the public’s search for a solution through greater

participation in governance. It was those issues of everyday and national exper-ience that imposed themselves on writings, verses, ‘bad talk’ and imagery.96


96 M. Kwass, Privilege and the politics of taxation in eighteenth-century France: ‘Liberte , Egalite , Fiscalite ’ (Cambridge, 2000), in demonstrating the actual weight of taxation that almost allof the French public paid, including nobles, provides concrete empirical ground for understandingthe growing dissatisfaction of the French with the government’s fiscal policy, a sentiment thatcarried broad political consequences. I hasten to add that not every problem or dissatisfactionexperienced in the late ancien re gime constituted – or should be looked upon as – a prelude torevolution. Different activities had their distinctive modes, shifts or conflicts; David’s ‘Horatii’ andBeaumarchais’s ‘Figaro’ did not necessarily foreshadow revolution. Historians must carefully make

their selections and priorities from among the many experiences and sources left behind and clearly placed in context.

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