Fake News and Salacious Rumors at Versailles

 
I am disappointed to hear that the PBS series Marie Antoinette depicts Count Fersen as the true father of the Queen's two youngest children. A book by Nancy Goldstone which came out a few years ago is filled with the same lies that the revolutionaries used to destroy her reputation. I so enjoyed Goldstone's books on Elizabeth Stuart and Marguerite de Valois. But to say that Marie-Antoinette's youngest children were illegitimate is utterly contrary to what we know about the Queen. And Louis XVI may have been high-functioning on the Asperger's/autism spectrum but that did not keep him from loving his wife and fathering children. So many old fallacies resurrected. What a shame! From Caroline Weber at The New York Times:

In her new biography, “In the Shadow of the Empress,” Nancy Goldstone seeks to tell “the story of a family of immensely strong women, beginning with Marie Antoinette’s formidable mother, the empress Maria Theresa … and three of her daughters, of whom the notorious queen of France was but the youngest.” (The other two are Queen Maria Carolina of Naples and Marie Christine, Duchess of Techsen.) Goldstone, the author of books about Catherine de Medici and Mary, Queen of Scots, is drawn to female royals who defy “tradition and stereotype,” and on that count her new subjects have much to offer. Regrettably, her book does not.

The problem starts with the “selected genealogy” that opens the book, where Goldstone lists the two youngest of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI’s four children, Louis-Charles (later Louis XVII) and Sophie, as the illegitimate offspring of Count Axel von Fersen, a Swedish officer whom the queen undoubtedly loved, but with whom, as the scholar Susan Lanser wrote in 2003, “no one yet … has been able to establish whether she had a consummated relationship.” Indeed, historians and biographers generally agree that the evidentiary record cannot answer this question conclusively.

On the one hand, speculation about the nature of the pair’s involvement was rife at Versailles, where scabrous rumor-mongering — especially about the ladies of the court — had flourished for more than a century. On the other, Marie Antoinette’s rank subjected her to the round-the-clock company and scrutiny of countless attendants, domestics and (during the French Revolution) guards. So closely monitored was her existence that of her 15-year friendship with Fersen his own diary — which Goldstone includes in her bibliography, and which Stefan Zweig describes in his influential study of Marie Antoinette as “a record of incomparable value for those who love ‘hard facts’” — identifies just one specific date on which the pair may have spent the night alone together. That hypothetical tryst occurred in February 1792, nearly seven years after Louis-Charles’s birth and five and a half years after Sophie’s. Even so, Goldstone justifies her claim about the two children’s paternity by asserting without qualification that the “Nordic dreamboat” was “the queen’s lover” and “stayed with her many nights.” (Read more.)

I cannot even begin to say how ridiculous the idea of  a 1792 affair is, because the Queen was under house arrest at the Tuileries, with guards outside the door and coming into her rooms at all time of the day and night. I have written more about this HERE, HERE, and HERE. And in my bio of Marie-Antoinette, HERE.

Marie-Josèphe de Saxe, Dauphine of France, wife of Louis the Dauphin, was the mother of Louis XVI. It is said that her little grandson, the tragic Louis XVII, resembled her a great deal, as can be seen in the portrait below. It gives further lie to the ridiculous rumor that Count Axel von Fersen fathered Louis-Charles (Louis XVII).