Queen consort of Louis XVI King of France Marie Antoinette - Marie Antoinette

To tell the story of Marie Antoinette means to reopen a trial which took place more than a century ago, and one in which the accusers and the defenders volleyed invectives at one another. The accusers were responsible for the passionate tone of the discussion. To assail the monarchy effectively, the Revolution had to attack the Queen, and in the Queen the woman. Sincerity and politics are rarely to be found dwelling under one roof, and little justice is to be expected from the exponents and manufacturers of what is styled public opinion, when, to gain some demagogic end, they undertake the description of a character. In pursuance of the determination to send Marie Antoinette to the guillotine, no calumny was spared. Newspapers, pamphlets and books denounced the louve autrichienneAustrian she-wolfas guilty of every crime, every form of moral corruption, every perversion. In the very law court, the public prosecutor did not hesitate to compare the Widow Capet with the most notoriously loose women of history, with Messalina, Agrippina and Fredegond. Naturally, therefore, a decisive change of note was sounded when, in 1815, a Bourbon remounted the French throne. In order to flatter the dynasty, the picture of the bitch-wolf was painted out, and overlaid with the brightest and oiliest colours. In almost all the descriptions dating from this period, the Queen is decked with a halo, and we seem to sniff the incense as we read. Panegyric followed panegyric. Marie Antoinettes inviolable virtue was fiercely championed; her readiness for self-sacrifice, her kindness of heart, her spotless heroism, were celebrated in prose and verse; a veil of anecdotes, richly bedewed with tears, and woven for the most part by aristocratic hands, was prepared to half-conceal the transfigured countenance of the martyred Queen.

In this matter, as in most, truth lies somewhere near the middle. Marie Antoinette was neither the great saint of royalism nor yet the great whore of the Revolution, but a mediocre, an average woman; not exceptionally able nor yet exceptionally foolish; neither fire nor ice; devoid of any vigorous wish to do good and of the remotest inclination to do evil; the average woman of yesterday, today and tomorrow; lacking impulse towards the daimonic, uninspired by the will to heroism, and therefore (one might fancy) unsuited to become the heroine of a tragedy. But history, the demiurge, can construct a profoundly moving drama even though there is nothing heroic about its leading personalities. Tragical tension is not solely conditioned by the mighty lineaments of central figures, but also by a disproportion between man and his destiny. This disproportion is invariably tragical. It may manifest itself dramatically when a titan, a hero, a genius, finds himself in conflict with his environment, which proves too narrow and too hostile for the performance of his allotted task. Such is the tragedy of a Napoleon, prisoned on the remote island of St Helena; of a Beethoven immured in deafness; of every great man denied scope for his powers. But tragedy arises no less when a momentous position, a crushing responsibility, is thrust upon a mediocrity or a weakling. Indeed, tragedy in this form makes a strong appeal to our human sympathies. A man out of the ordinary run is unconsciously impelled to seek a fate out of the ordinary run. His superdimensional temperament makes him organically inclined to live heroically, or (to use Nietzsches word) dangerously. He challenges the world because it is his nature to do so. Thus in the last analysis the genius is partly responsible for his own sufferings, since his inward vocation mystically craves for the fiery ordeal which can alone evoke his uttermost energies. His relentless fate drives him swiftly, and uplifts him as the storm a seagull.

The mediocrity, on the other hand, is temperamentally disposed towards an easy and peaceful existence. He does not want, does not need, tension, but would rather live quietly and inconspicuously, where the wind blows not fiercely and destiny does her work in milder fashion. That is why he adopts the defensive, that is why he grows anxious, that is why he flees, whenever an unseen hand tries to thrust him into the forefront of the fray. Far from craving for a position of historical responsibility, he shrinks from it. He does not seek suffering, but has to bear it when it is forced upon him. If he is ever compelled to transcend his own standards, the compulsion has come from without, not from within. Precisely because the average man, the mediocrity, lacks vision, lacks insight, his sorrow seems to me as great asand perhaps more moving thanthat of the true hero whose misfortunes stir the popular imagination; for poor Everyman has to bear his cross unaided, and has not, like the artist, the spiritual salvation of being able to transform his torment into work and thus give it lasting form.

The life of Marie Antoinette is perhaps the most signal example in history of the way in which destiny will at times pluck a mediocre human being from obscurity and, with commanding hand, force the man or the woman in question to overstep the bounds of mediocrity. During the first thirty of her eight-and-thirty years, she pursued her inconspicuous course, though in an exalted sphere as far as social station was concerned; never transgressing the conventional standards whether for good or for evil; a tepid creature, an average woman; and, historically regarded, to begin with, nothing more than a lay-figure decked in a queens robes. Had it not been for the outbreak of the Revolution, this insignificant Habsburg princess who had married a king of France would have continued, in her cheerful and untroubled play-world, to live her life after the fashion of hundreds of millions of women of all epochs. She would have danced, chattered, loved, laughed, made up her face, paid visits, bestowed alms; she would have borne children, and would at long last have died in her bed, without ever having lived in any true sense of the term. She would have been interred with pomp and ceremony, and the court would have worn mourning for the prescribed number of weeks; thereafter she would have vanished from human memory as completely as numberless other princesses, the Mary Adelaides and Adelaide Maries, the Anne Catherines and Catherine Annes, whose tombstones stand unread in the Almanach de Gotha. Never would any living creature have desired to study her vanished form or to reimagine the characteristics of her defunct spirit. But for her sufferings, no one would have known who she really was. More important still, had it not been for these same sufferings, she herself, Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, would not have known. For it is part of the fortune or misfortune of the average man that, unless Fate calls upon him to do so, he is not moved to enquire about himself. No irresistible inner impulse stirs him to turn his curiosity in this direction. He allows his possibilities to slumber unutilized. Like muscles that are never exercised, his forces atrophy unless bitter need calls on him to tense them. A mediocrity must be spurred out of himself if he is to become all that he might be, and probably more than he has dreamt of becoming. For this, Fate has no other whip than disaster. Just as an artist will often use some trivial motive for the display of great creative energies, so, now and again, Destiny will avail herself of an insignificant hero, to demonstrate her capacity for weaving a tragedy out of weak and reluctant material. Marie Antoinette was a crowning instance of such an involuntary acceptance of the heroic role.