Tea at Trianon: The Church’s Oligarch

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

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

The Church’s Oligarch

Richelieu was the ultimate schemer. From First Things:

Marie de Vignerot, the Duchess of Aiguillon, outmaneuvered popes and overawed princes; she counseled kings and steered the state; she managed and invested a colossal fortune, with which she raised hospitals, freed slaves, and flung missions to the far corners of the earth; she negotiated treaties, governed cities, eluded kidnappers, and threw the very best dinner parties in Paris—but perhaps her most impressive triumph was refusing to sell her house.
The prospective buyer was Louis XIV, who had something of a passion for fine domestic architecture, and whose chateau-envy could be deadly—as his hapless finance minister would soon discover. To refuse the monarch any request carried a whiff of treason; to refuse this monarch on the subject of houses was tantamount to suicide. But Marie de Vignerot didn’t blink. She told the king that she couldn’t possibly sell the old place—and reminded him of all the time, toil, and treasure she and her uncle had devoted to rebuilding and maintaining it. That uncle was the late Cardinal Richelieu, and the Sun King understood what the old duchess was really saying: Think, Your Majesty, of all the time, toil, and treasure we have devoted to rebuilding and maintaining your Crown. Louis never raised the subject again.

Bronwen McShea relates this extraordinary vignette toward the end of La Duchesse, her new biography of this magnificent grande dame. Heiress to one of the most hated men in history and a lady who could stare down the Sun King, Vignerot might seem a severe subject for a biographer, but McShea’s authorial relationship with her duchess is one of affection and intimacy. (She refers to her as “Marie” throughout the book, an informality that I will adopt below—“Vignerot” does not roll so easily off the anglophone tongue.) The portrait that emerges is a winsome one, and I finished the book thinking that Marie might now be the figure from French history I would most like to invite to dinner (safer than her uncle, and more fun than Charles de Gaulle).

McShea has done a great service with this rich, deeply researched, and lively book. Though a definitive biography of luxuriant detail, La Duchesse is disciplined by short and vivid chapters. It argues convincingly that Marie de Vignerot shaped both the Catholic Church and the French state at pivotal moments in their histories but has been unjustly forgotten by both. This amnesia is hardly surprising: The Church is uncomfortable with foxy duchesses who bend popes to their wills, and France has never quite figured out how to feel about the cardinal in whose scarlet eminence Marie was regally enrobed. Happily correcting this injustice, La Duchesse rescues the memory of this indefatigable woman, illuminates her grand and gorgeous moment in history—and draws some pointed lessons for our own time.

Marie de Vignerot was born into an era of religious wars, when the extinction of France and the survival of Christendom both seemed live possibilities; by the time of her death, Louis XIV was busy rebuilding Versailles. She was thus present for, and indeed helped midwife, the birth of modern Europe. She was, at times, among the richest and most powerful people in the world. But McShea makes clear that she owed everything to Richelieu, who directed her life from her earliest childhood, loved her as a daughter, and quite unconventionally made her his primary heiress. (Read more.)