Et, non, ce n'est pas Fersen
Even though the royal family controlled the throne, it couldn’t control its imagepar Ryan Fan
Portrait of Marie Antoinette in 1778, by Élisabeth Vigée Le BrunWe all know Marie Antoinette as the Queen during the French Revolution who was famously beheaded at the guillotine, a symbol for everything wrong with the out of touch, unsympathetic monarchy.
Even though it’s probably not true that she actually said it, people think that Marie Antoinette said “let them eat cake” in 1789, at the start of the French Revolution. Her place in history would be cemented as everything wrong with the rich, out of touch French monarchy, and Marie Antoinette’s name is synonymous with that famous misattributed phrase (Jean-Jacques Rousseau first mentions the phrase in Confessions, written in 1767, saying it was attributed to a “great princess. In 1767, Marie Antoinette was 12-years-old).
What hastened her execution during the French Revolution was a scandal that ruined her already poor reputation with the French people. Few people now know that Marie Antoinette was involved in a true crime case where she was framed for defrauding jewelers for a very expensive diamond necklace.
“The Queen’s necklace”, reconstruction, Château de Breteuil, FranceLouis XV, in 1772, decided to make his mistress, Madame du Barry, a special gift that cost 1,600,000 livres ($15.1 million in 2020). He asked two Parisian jewelers, Paul Bassange and Charles Auguste Boehmer to make a diamond necklace that would be one of the most expensive and the grandest of all time.
The necklace would take a long time to make, but Louis XV died of smallpox before the necklace was finished. One of his grandsons, Louis XVI, would banish Du Barry from the court after Louis XV died of smallpox and Louis XVI succeeded the throne. However, after Louis XVI ascended to the throne, the necklace was finished, and Louis XVI was offered the necklace by Bassange and Boehmer.
Louis XVI wanted to gift the necklace to his famously extravagant wife, Marie Antoinette. But she denied his offer, saying that “We have more need of Seventy-Fours [ships] than of necklaces.”
Jeanne of Valois-Saint-Rémy, engraved by an unknown artist At the time, a woman named Jeanne de Lalois-Saint-Rémy, who called herself the “Comtesse de la Motte”, made
an elaborate scam to win a life of luxury she desired.
La Motte was a woman who said she was a descendant of the French nobility but had few links to the nobility. At one point, she tried to win the favor of Marie Antoinette, who refused to meet with her after hearing of La Motte’s questionable background.
She was married to a man who proclaimed himself the “Comte de La Motte”. La Motte would later become the lover and mistress of Cardinal de Rohan, who was a French ambassador to Vienna, who had lost the trust of Marie Antoinette.
At some point in 1774, Cardinal de Rohan revealed the frivolous actions of Marie Antoinette to her mother, Empress Maria Theresa, which led to Marie Antoinette being reprimanded by her mother. According to historian Vincent Cronin, a British biographer, he also attempted to thwart Marie Antoinette’s marriage to Louis XVI.
Wanting to win back his seat on the royal court, Cardinal de Rohan was willing to do anything to get back into her graces.
She learned that Boehmer and Bassange were facing bankruptcy since no one was paying for the necklace that Louis XV once agreed to pay for. La Motte would encourage Cardinal de Rohan to write a letter to the Queen, and she would promise to pass on the letters to the Queen.
Cardinal de RohanInstead of actually delivering Cardinal de Rohan’s messages to the Queen, La Motte herself, with the help of Villette, a forger, wrote fake letters from the Queen that manipulated Cardinal de Rohan’s desire to make it back into the royal court.
She would write about Marie Antoinette’s desire to buy the necklace, but the reluctance of the King in buying it due to the financial situation of the country. Instead, Marie Antoinette’s “letters” would say that she hoped the cardinal would lend her money as a secret. Cardinal de Rohan became convinced that Marie Antoinette was in love with him, and he started to love her back.
Cardinal de Rohan agreed to buy the necklace for the Queen. In the Palace of Versailles, he had a secret arrangement to meet the Queen, but La Motte would send a prostitute who resembled the Queen named Nicole le Guay d’Olivia. She would tell Cardinal de Rohan that he was forgiven, and then the cardinal contacted Bassange and Boehmer to pay for the 1.6 million livres necklace in installments, convinced that he had gotten back in the good graces of the royal court.
The jewelers would give the necklace to La Motte, who then passed it on to her husband. Her husband would sell the diamonds in individual stones in London and obviously make a lot of money doing it, and Bassange and Boehmer would notify Marie Antoinette of the negotiations and the sale.
When she received the letter, she burned it and didn’t pay it any mind. But then Cardinal de Rohan didn’t have enough money to make the first installment. Boehmer then complained to the Queen, and Marie Antoinette would say that she never received nor ordered the necklace. Boehmer, baffled, told her about the negotiations.
Marie Antoinette’s execution in 1793 at the Place de la RévolutionThe Cardinal de Rohan would be arrested on August 15, 1785. Before he was arrested, he destroyed any of his correspondence with “the Queen” and on August 18, 1785, La Motte was arrested after destroying her papers.
They would also arrest the Olivia, who played the prostitute, and Villette, who forged the letters and imitated her signatures. Another man was arrested but it would soon be revealed that he had no part in the affair.
In the trial, which ended the next year on May 31, 1786, Cardinal de Rohan and Olivia would be acquitted. Villette was banished. La Motte would be condemned to be whipped, branded, and quarantined in Salpetrière, a prostitute’s prison and her husband would be condemned to be a galley slave.
“Public opinion was much excited by this trial. It is generally believed that Marie Antoinette was stainless in the matter, that Rohan was an innocent dupe, and that the Lamottes deceived both for their own ends. People, however, persisted in the belief that the Queen had used the countess as an instrument to satisfy her hatred of the cardinal de Rohan.” — wrote Hugh Chisholm in a 1911 version of the
Encyclopædia Britannica.
Public opinion as a result of the trial actually sided against the Queen. Even though she was completely innocent, people in France almost unanimously took a stance against her due to a perception that she manipulated the whole case to ruin the Cardinal, her enemy, all the while framing an innocent woman in the La Motte. She would become a liability to her husband as she became more and more unpopular.
Antonia Fraser would write in
Marie Antoinette: The Journey that such an implication was foolish, yet people believed it anyways:
“Never politically Machiavellian…the Queen was incapable of conceiving, let alone carrying out such an elaborate conspiracy.”
Her lavish spending already damaging her reputation with the public before, by the end of the diamond necklace scandal, Marie Antoinette’s reputation was now beyond repair.
What didn’t help was that La Motte would later escape prison, flee to London, and in 1789, publish memoirs that justified her actions and cast all the blame of her case on Marie Antoinette. La Motte would die, at 35, on June 3, 1791, after falling out from her hotel window while hiding from debt collectors. British newspaper,
The Times, would say:
“The female foreigner, who as mentioned in our paper Wednesday, jumped out of a window and broke both her legs, proves to be the famous Countess de La Motte of Necklace Memory.”
Marie Antoinette would be executed by guillotine during the peak of the French Revolution, at 12:15 p.m. on October 16, 1793. Her last words would be “pardon me, sir, I did not do it on purpose,” after stepping on the executioner’s shoe.
Pierre Saint-Amand, a French professor at Yale, would compare Marie Antoinette’s reputation to that of Hilary Clinton, despite the fact that the two women were separated by two hundred years. Both were powerful women largely vilified by the public, often unfairly.
According to Saint-Amand, the diamond necklace scandal was “designed to leave the Queen in a state of scandal, with the impossibility of claiming any truth for herself.”
Of course, context is needed in that France was still very much on the verge of revolution before the whole scandal, but I find myself personally baffled at how the truth of Marie Antoinette’s case did not matter to public opinion.
What didn’t matter was that Marie Antoinette was not guilty of the fraud — what matters is that people thought she was guilty. Jonathan Beckman, the author of
How to Ruin a Queen, said that the scandal, despite Marie Antoinette’s innocence, showed that a Queen could be imitated by a prostitute and that her signature could be imitated by a forger. The royal family was no longer seen as “royal” as rightful rulers.
Beckman notes that the royal family controlled the throne, but lost legitimacy during this bombshell scandal, mostly because it couldn’t control its image.
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