Book/Marie-Therese: The Fate of Marie Antoinette's Daughter by Susan Nagel

Marie-Thérèse de Bourbon, the daughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, is one of the most tragic characters in modern history. Orphaned by the French revolution and released only after three years of harsh imprisonment, she remains an icon for French royalists to this day. After the Bourbon restoration in 1814, she became the leading female figure at court for almost 20 years, exercising considerable political power. Yet no adequate biography of her exists in French, let alone in English.

No reading of the story of Marie-Thérèse’s early sufferings can fail to shock. By the age of 17, she had witnessed brutal mob violence, her father, mother and aunt had gone to the guillotine, and her 10-year-old brother had died in prison of malnutrition and tuberculosis, in a cell littered with his own excrement. To add to her psychological torment, nobody bothered to inform her that her mother was dead for almost two years. Eventually released from captivity in December 1795, she was reunited with the remnants of her family in Russia, marrying her cousin, the duc d’Angouleme, in 1799.

Susan Nagel tells Marie-Thérèse’s story vividly, if uncritically. Her book will gratify those who seek a detailed narrative of Marie-Thérèse’s life (1778-1851), but it is weak on its wider historical context. Nagel’s view of the French revolution is uniformly negative, and not particularly penetrating. After all, the upheaval of 1789 had profound and long-term causes, not just short-term and personal ones. To ascribe the pivotal role Nagel does to the ambitions of Louis XVI’s treacherous cousin the duc d’Orléans makes a good story, but it is unclear whether he had any real influence on the outbreak of the revolution. Likewise, the dreadful treatment meted out to the king and queen was prompted more by the political choices they made in 1789 than by their personal flaws. The bibliography is solid, but more footnoting is needed for the text itself.

What the book does do is prompt reflections on trauma and its effect on history. It is remarkable that Marie-Thérèse survived as a functioning human being at all after the treatment she suffered, but she certainly remained indelibly marked by it. Her hoarse, cracked voice as an adult was a result of refusing to speak for a year during her imprisonment – a classic response to abuse. To a lesser extent, her trauma was shared by all the surviving Bourbons. Her two uncles, who reigned successively after 1814 as Louis XVIII and Charles X, lost a brother, sister, nephew and sister-in-law, and while not actually imprisoned, were forced to flee France. Like Marie-Thérèse, they sought refuge in Catholic piety, reactionary politics and a cult of the dead. While understandable at a psychological level, these choices hardly equipped them to heal their country’s divisions. On a purely personal level, the sufferings inflicted on the Bourbons by the revolution made the chances of a successful restoration slim indeed.

Once the Bourbons were back on the throne, Marie-Thérèse, as the greatest living symbol of royal martyrdom, acquired iconic status and, with it, political power. She was helped in this by the fact that both Louis XVIII and Charles X were widowers, so that by acting as their hostess she became the most prominent woman at court over two reigns. Her mystique was heightened by her remarkable courage during the Hundred Days when, stranded in Bordeaux, she harangued troops of doubtful loyalty to prevent them defecting to the returning Napoleon. This prompted Napoleon himself to comment: “She is the only man in the family!”

Yet Marie-Thérèse proved unwilling – or, more probably, unable – to place her reputation and undoubted charisma at the service of any other cause than a narrow and backward-looking conservatism. She made strenuous efforts to keep her uncle Louis XVIII, who sometimes wavered, on the reactionary path that soon after his death would lead to the 1830 revolution and his family’s flight from France once more. Arguably, her most disastrous legacy to the Bourbons dates from these last years of exile. This was the deeply retrograde education, steeped in family piety, she organised for the family’s heir, the young comte de Chambord, which ensured that when the last best chance of a restoration of the monarchy finally arrived after the Franco-Prussian war on 1870-1, he was completely incapable of grasping it. Marie-Thérèse did not witness this, having died in Austria in 1851, aged 72.

The fall of dynasties often gives rise to legends, and the Bourbons are no exception. For years after the restoration, a succession of individuals turned up claiming to be Marie-Thérèse’s younger brother, “Louis XVII” to royalists, with stories of having somehow survived the revolution. They caused Marie-Thérèse, who remained convinced her brother was dead, great distress, and she refused to meet any of them. Following DNA analysis proving that the heart of the boy originally buried as “Louis XVII” is indeed that of a Bourbon, it is clear that she was right, and that these claimants were imposters. It has even been proposed that Marie-Thérèse herself was secretly switched with a double on her release from captivity, to live out her days in seclusion as the so-called “Dark Countess” in central Germany. Nagel shows that this theory is without foundation. The story is, however, so implausible – what motive would either of the parties concerned have had in making such a switch? – that it hardly seems worthwhile demolishing it.

“All you who pass this way, behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.” The inscription on Marie-Thérèse’s tomb sums up how she saw herself, and how she wanted posterity to see her. For those who already view her as a saint and near-martyr, Nagel’s biography will make satisfying reading. But it will change few minds. The definitive study of Marie-Thérèse, analysing in depth her tragic life and her important political role, remains to be written.