The King of France Had No Mistress, So Every Hatred Fell on the Queen
The monarch was held to be chosen by God, so attacking the king could count as treason; the only people it was safe to abuse were the queen and the mistress. Louis XVI, unlike the French kings before him, had no mistress, so the resentment had nowhere else to drain and landed entirely on Marie Antoinette.
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With no mistress, all the hatred landed on the queen
The king was held to be chosen by God, and attacking him in public could be treated as treason, so the court's resentment had to find substitute outlets — the queen and the mistress, two targets sharing the load. Louis XVI, unlike other French kings, had no mistress. Kate Williams says that fact by itself irritated a great many people at court: a mistress meant two routes to the king, and now there was only one. The consequence was that every attack that should have been split in two fell on the queen. This structural gap matters more than any single accusation — the charges of extravagance, adultery and treason could grow as large as they did because there was no second person to take half of them.
— Kate WilliamsRousseau wrote the cake line, and she was nine that year
"Let them eat cake" is wrong in three places. The original line was about brioche; the man who wrote it was the philosopher Rousseau, in his Confessions in 1765 — he describes wanting to go into a bakery but feeling too finely dressed for it, and then remembering that "a great princess" had said the poor could eat brioche; and in that year Marie Antoinette was nine years old, living in Vienna, and nobody in France had any idea who she was. The line was only pinned on her in the 1840s, and it has never come off since. The same episode offers a contrast: her contemporary Catherine the Great wrote to the French royal family during the revolution with advice, saying that a king should simply do as he saw fit and go his own way.
— Kate WilliamsShe really did spend heavily, but the debt was not her spending
Kate Williams does not acquit her completely: the queen spent too much, and her mother wrote to scold her for it; Versailles spent too much, and the king spent too much as well — they treated luxury as part of the job, a shop window for French manufacturing. But the real hole was somewhere else: the enormous debt left after Britain beat France badly in the Seven Years' War, a tax system that could not bring the money in, a tax burden pressed onto poor people who had nothing to start with, nobles who paid nothing, and a central bureaucracy so old it creaked. Then came the war in North America: the money ran out, Britain was indeed defeated, the American colonies became independent, and France got nothing out of it. The national debt went out of control from that point, and the bill was written in the queen's name — Madame Deficit.
— Kate WilliamsThe rumours came from the nobles who never got an invitation
She disliked the ranked order of Versailles, and she felt those people had been unkind to her during her years without a child, so she kept to a small circle of friends and withdrew into the Petit Trianon. The traditional nobility were shut out and furious — but "nobody invites us to the parties" makes a poor weapon. So the same fact was retold in another form: out there she was playing at being a shepherdess, and staging all kinds of bizarre debauchery. Kate Williams points out that the Petit Hameau was in fact a working farm that supplied food to the tables of Versailles, and that this was very fashionable among nobles at the time; in today's terms she was an early urban farmer. The true version mobilises nobody; the processed version does.
— Kate WilliamsThe cardinal was acquitted, and that is what confirmed the rumour
What mattered in the Diamond Necklace Affair was not the fraud but the verdict. She had turned the necklace down twice — 650 stones, 1.5 million livres — on the grounds that it had been designed for a king's mistress, that it was not to her taste, and that it was too expensive: "what we need is ships, not necklaces." The swindler Jeanne de Lamotte found a Paris sex worker to impersonate the queen and meet Cardinal de Rohan after dark in the gardens of Versailles; once she had the necklace she sold it on. Courtiers urged the king to bury the matter, but the king and queen insisted on a public trial, meaning to clear their name with it. Jeanne was convicted and branded with a V, the mark of a thief; de Rohan was acquitted — which came close to an official finding that a man could reasonably believe he had met the queen in the gardens at midnight.
— Kate WilliamsThe failed flight was the step that could not be undone
Before the flight, Kate Williams estimates that 95 or 96 percent of the country wanted nothing more than a constitutional monarchy: the king as a figurehead, spending less, accepting that role. The execution broke down at every point — a very large carriage was used for the sake of dignity; the party consisted of the queen, the king's sister, the royal governess and the children, with not one soldier among them who could improvise command; the Duc de Choiseul, who was to meet them at the first stage, was already known as a man who panicked easily, and when they failed to arrive on time he decided the plan was cancelled and sent everyone and all the horses off to sleep. They were caught within twenty-four hours. On the road back to Paris, people turned their backs and watched them in silence. After that the constitutional road was closed, and what remained was war between the Assembly and the king.
— Kate WilliamsKilling the king required a vote; killing her did not
The king got a trial, with lawyers presenting evidence, and a vote in the National Convention that carried by six votes, and he was allowed time to pray. The queen got no such procedure: in an all-night meeting, a politician and journalist said that he had already promised the people Marie Antoinette's head, and that if they would not give it to him he would go and cut it off himself; if the head was not handed over, the people would take it themselves. The trial even produced a charge that she had committed incest with her son, and she made her case to the mothers in the room; Kate Williams believes the sympathy of the women present actually hastened the end — the queen was too persuasive the moment she opened her mouth, and the committee felt all the more strongly that she had to be got rid of quickly. In the end there was no vote; the execution was simply decided. The king rode to his death in a carriage; she rode in an open tumbrel.
— Kate WilliamsIn their own words · checked verbatim
So they'll attack the wife and they'll attack the mistress. But with no mistress, it's all going to go on the wife.
Kate Williams11:19
The let them eat cake is actually totally untrue. First of all, the quote was about brioche.
Kate Williams13:25
it's not going to work for them to say, oh, well, no one invited us to the party.
Kate Williams20:38
But sometimes they're just there to be put in a sort of lined up and like a bowling alley and have a ball thrown at them and knocking them down.
Kate Williams23:43
She says we need ships more than we need a necklace.
Kate Williams26:57
I would say probably 95, 96 percent of the country want Louis to be a figurehead.
Kate Williams37:16
i have promised the people the head of marie antoinette and i'll cut it off myself if you don't give it to them
Kate Williams49:49
the king went to his execution in a carriage marie antoinette goes in an open cart she is the real enemy of france even though she could never ever be on the throne
Kate Williams51:58
Figures
| Marie's place among her mother's children | the 15th child | 2:01 |
| Age when sent to the French court to be married | 14 | 1:01 |
| Interval from the marriage to a confirmed pregnancy | 7 years confirmed (consummation estimated at roughly 3-4 years) | 10:19 |
| Age on becoming queen | 18 | 15:30 |
| Year Rousseau wrote the "eat brioche" line | 1765 | 13:25 |
| Number of stones in the diamond necklace | 650 | 25:52 |
| Price of the diamond necklace | 1.5 million livres | 26:57 |
| Last time the Estates General had met | 1614 | 34:12 |
| Share of the population who wanted the king as a symbolic monarch | about 95%-96% | 37:16 |
| Vote to execute the king | carried by 6 votes | 48:46 |
Glossary
- Petit Hameau
- A genuinely working farm inside Versailles that supplied food to the court, drawn in caricature as her dressing up as a shepherdess.
- Salic law
- French succession excluded women, so a queen could only ever be a consort and could never take the throne herself.
- Estates General
- The assembly of representatives of the nobility, the clergy and the Third Estate, reconvened for the first time since 1614.
- flight to Varennes
- The royal family's failed escape and capture in the summer of 1791, after which constitutional monarchy was no longer possible.
How to listen
People who work in PR and reputation crises, nonfiction writers, and readers who want to understand how a person gets convicted by public opinion.
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