Goodbye, Versailles!

How Marie Antoinette navigated the political crises of 1787-1789, and the advent of the French Revolution.

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Marie Antoinette and Her Children, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun ca. 1787. The empty cradle belonged to the queen’s last child, Marie Sophie, who died in infancy. The portrait was exhibited in the 1787 Salon: a rare piece of propaganda from the queen, meant to humanize her and elicit sympathy from the public. Via Wikimedia Commons.

On October 5th, 1789, an angry mob of mainly women began their march from Paris to Versailles. After years of intolerable hunger and obstacles to reform, the mob had three demands: bread for the people of France, the king’s approval of the National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the return of the monarchy to Paris. The age of absolute monarchy in France was over.

As we’ve established in the first two installments of this series, the breakdown of the French monarchy was decades in the making, including Louis XIV’s decision to move the royal court to Versailles in 1682. The Sun King’s project resulted from his desire to insulate the monarchy and to keep all his scheming nobles under the watchful eye of the sovereign. But the cost, beyond the extraordinary expense of building Versailles into the most glorious palace in Europe, was a palpable lack of connection to the public. By the time that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette understood the true scope of the public’s hatred towards them, it was already too late.

Let’s rewind two years, to 1787: Marie Antoinette was still reeling from the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, and the economic situation in France was dire. Royal revenue that year was 475 million livres, but about half of that went to servicing the nation’s debt.¹ Fighting several expensive wars (including supporting the American Revolution—oh, the irony) remained part of the issue; the other part was a completely imbalanced tax system. The First Estate (the clergy) and the Second Estate (the nobility) paid very little, if any taxes, while the bulk of the tax burden fell on the Third Estate (everyone else). Unlike Britain, which already had a constitutional monarchy, the French monarchy offered little transparency regarding its finances.

The king and queen had another problem: any reforms that they tried to pass through the Parlement de Paris were routinely stifled. After all, most members of France’s largest Parlement were aristocrats—why would they vote to relinquish their own privileges? Either the monarchy would have to persuade the Parlement to give the government a hefty loan (which was unlikely), or they would need to increase taxes.