Tea at Trianon: "Lack of Scholarly Rigor"

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, January 1, 2022

"Lack of Scholarly Rigor"

Caroline Weber and Nancy Goldstone debate Dr. Weber's critique of Dr. Goldstone's book in the New York Times. I must say that I am really disappointed to discover Dr. Goldstone's blatant lack of historical exegesis since I really liked her book on Elizabeth Stuart. I am beginning to wonder if she even reads French. Every time I come across grotesque mistakes pertaining to Marie-Antoinette it turns out the person does not read French, and therefore has missed out on the recent French scholarship of Delorme, Bertière, Petitfils, etc. To quote Dr. Weber:

Nancy Goldstone opens her book with a “Selected Genealogy” that attributes paternity of Marie Antoinette’s two youngest children — including the dauphin Louis-Charles (later Louis XVII) — to the Swedish Count Axel von Fersen, as if this were a matter of established fact, and throughout her narrative she refers to the alleged affair between the French queen and Fersen, as if this, too, were not contested by scholars, at one point asserting that he “would remain the queen’s lover until her death.” If I focused on these aspects of Goldstone’s book in my review, it was because, far from constituting “minutiae,” as Goldstone puts it, I found them symptomatic of her lack of scholarly rigor.
Numerous reputable biographies and histories — including by Hilaire Belloc (1909), André Castelot (1957), Stanley Loomis (1972), Claude Manceron (1974), Desmond Seward (1981), Simon Schama (1989), Evelyne Lever (2000), Antonia Fraser (2001), Munro Price (2014) and John Hardman (2019) — have examined the evidence for an affair and, while entertaining different theories about the extent and nature of the pair’s relationship, all concede that the historical record permits no definitive conclusion. Contrary to what Goldstone alleges, the recent decryption by a team of French researchers of eight pieces of correspondence between Marie Antoinette and Fersen does not alter this fact. As Le Monde reported in June 2020, these letters “confirm the thesis, so long invoked, of an emotional relationship [relation sentimentale], without, however, making any earth-shattering revelation [révélation fracassante] on the subject.” The paper went on to quote a curator at France’s National Archives, who said, “These new documents do not constitute an erotic correspondence, nor even, properly speaking, an amorous one.”
There is one piece of new research that bears directly on Goldstone’s claim about the paternity of the dauphin but which I learned of only after writing my review. This is a study published in 2019 in the International Journal of Sciences by French scientists who compared the DNA on a lock of hair belonging to Louis-Charles to DNA belonging to Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. In conclusion, the researchers write: “Numerous rumors, since the beginning, doubted about Louis XVI’s paternity of his children. We demonstrate here that Louis-Charles (Louis XVII) is truly Louis XVI’s son.”
As to the charge that I aimed to “demean” Dr. Linda Gray, the Connecticut pediatrician whose answers to Goldstone’s questions about Louis XVI’s behavioral eccentricities became, in Goldstone’s analysis, proof that the king was autistic, I would merely reiterate the point I made in my review, which is that Gray’s responses cannot be taken as a proper professional diagnosis since Louis XVI died almost 230 years ago and was never personally examined by Gray. (Read more.)

As for Louis XVI being autistic, I think he may have been highly functioning on the spectrum, but there is no way to diagnose a dead person. On the original critique, HERE.

HERE is a link to Dr. Goldstone's website where she defends her theories. I hesitated linking to it since I feel embarrassed for her; there are so many errors about Marie-Antoinette, proving a serious lack of research. She obviously did not read the testimonies of the Prince de Ligne, or of Hézècques abut the Queen's personal virtue. There are several other primary sources which defend Marie-Antoinette's faithfulness to her husband, and I refer to them in my biography of the Queen, below: