Jeanne Louise Henriette Genest Campan was close in age to Marie Antoinette when she acted as one of the young queen’s attendants. She was by all accounts an intellectual, an educator, and fairly progressive during the Napoleonic era. Madame Campan was sent to wait on Marie Antoinette in 1774. She served in that capacity until 1792 when the French Monarchy was overthrown. Madame Campan wrote about waiting on Marie in a fairly sterile and very removed fashion, especially given the circumstances that occurred at the end of her service to the queen. After Marie’s death, Madame Campan apparently developed a friendship with Napoleon. She worked as a teacher and served as head of the Institut in Saint-Germain. Later, Napoleon appointed Madame Campan as the new director of an all-girls school at Écouen that educated family members of the Legion of Honour.
Madame Campan was a fairly prolific writer. Among her publications were, De l’éducation, Conseils aux jeunes filles, Théâtre pour les jeunes personnes, and Quelques essais de morale. The document discussed here is from Madame Campan’s The Private Life of Marie Antoinette. The larger memoir was about Marie Antoinette’s life in France. It depicts a young girl, a foreigner, who was surrounded by attendants from the moment she arrived in France. Madame Campan supports Marie’s complaints about never having any privacy or a moment to herself. Madame Campan’s memoir was first released in 1818. It was later professionally published in 1823. In its entirety, it depicts the excesses of the French court, the brutal circumstances of the beginnings of the French Revolution, and a proud young queen who was very unhappy.
One of the first statements that Madame Campan writes in this document is telling, “In order to describe the queen's private service intelligibly, it must be recollected that service of every kind was honor, and had not any other denomination.” One of the reasons that the court was so packed with people who attended royalty was because the population in France at the time was so large relative to the rest of Europe. France’s physical area was large and the population of approximately twenty-two million people was triple that of England at the time. France’s population was many times greater than other royal empires including the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, and Spain. There were an estimated 600,000 French nobles, many seeking service in the court of the King or the Queen or anyone in the royal household. It was a very desirable job and one of the few approved occupations for nobles. This large population accounts for the seemingly unreasonable number of people attending Marie Antoinette as well as the unrest among the populace when harvests failed and food shortages became widespread.
Marie Antoinette has fascinated people for generations. Her life was relatively short, she was not yet forty years old when she died. Marie Antoinette was born in 1755 in Vienna, Austria to the royal family headed by the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. In 1763, at the end of a lengthy series of wars, Austria and France decided to create a political alliance that was secured, as was common during the period, by marriage between the two royal families. In 1765, King XV’s heir was his grandson, Louis-Auguste, who was 11 years old. At this time, Marie Antoinette was 10 years old. The royal families arranged a marriage between the two children.
Because Marie was a foreigner, special arrangements were made for her marriage to the future king of France, even though she was only a child. According to the document by Madame Campan, Marie did not qualify as a princess of the family, that would have meant she was a relative and presumably French. Marie was instead a foreign princess. Thus, it can be assumed that the description of what happened when the 14-year-old Marie arrived to be married to her equally young is accurate. Marie was met by a group of women who redressed her in appropriate clothing, “When a foreign princess was married to the heir presumptive, or a son of France, it was the etiquette to go and meet her with her wedding clothes; the young princess was undressed in the pavilion usually built upon the frontiers for the occasion, and every article of her apparel, without exception, was changed.” Madame Campan goes on to explain that the new clothing given to the foreign princess was very rich and elaborate as befitted the princess’s station in life. Other resources describe the young Marie as blonde, delicate, intelligent, lazy, and frivolous. She arrived for her wedding with a huge entourage of carriages, footmen, servants, and horses.
Marie Antoinette was unhappy from the beginning. She wrote many letters to her mother telling her that she was crying all the time and homesick. Marie complained of how many people were attending her and felt they were watching her every move. The way Madame Campan explains the circumstances indicates that this is what was expected at the French court of the ladies who attended the princess. There was extensive protocols, even ones that concerned handing Marie a glass of water, “supposing the queen asked for a glass of water, the servant of the chamber handed to the first woman a silver gilt waiter, upon which were placed a covered goblet and a small decanter; but should the lady of honor come in, the first woman was obliged to present the waiter to her, and if Madame or the Countess d'Artois came in at the moment, the waiter went again from the lady of honor into the hands of the princess, before it reached the queen.” Marie was dressed by a group of women, her clothes were selected by committee, and she had to apply her make-up in front of dozens of other people.
When King Louis XV died, Marie had been living in France under constant supervision for about five years, from the age of fourteen until the age of nineteen. Her husband, Louis-Auguste became King Louis XVI. Louis XVI was reportedly shy and retiring. He was not assertive and his main enjoyments were being alone, it appears the desire to be alone was something he had in common with his wife. He liked to read and Marie liked to party. By all accounts, she had grown into a high-strung high-spirited nineteen year old who loved gambling and socializing. It became known, and how could it not given the fact that these two were under constant surveillance, that the couple were leading separate lives. They slept separately and seemed to have no interest in consummating their marriage. So close was the scrutiny of attendants that Marie’s mother found out they had not consummated their marriage. Marie’s mother sent one of Marie’s older brothers to France to make sure the couple consummated their marriage. Marie gave birth to a baby girl in 1778. Soon after the birth of her daughter, Marie moved into Petit Trianon, a small private castle near the Palace of Versailles. She and King Louis XVI went back to leading separate lives. During this period, Marie was presumably having an affair with Count Axel von Fersen from Sweden. This was also a period during which the French economy was in poor shape and droughts ravaged harvests. France did not have good shipping interior routes. The problem of shipping combined with poor harvests was aggravated by corruption and privileges that delayed or completely halted the transportation of food, even when there was an adequate supply. People in France were starving to death needlessly because of obscure rules and laws. These laws were centuries in the making and certainly not the fault of Marie Antoinette, no matter what her spending habits may have been. However, people in the country who sought to overthrow the French monarchy passed out propaganda pamphlets depicting Marie as a drain on France; she was nicknamed "Madame Deficit." Taxes increased and the burden of paying them was placed upon the peasants.
French nobles were not shy about their superiority, they flaunted it. It was part of the culture for nobles to dress in outlandishly expensive fashions and parade themselves around Paris and other areas of France displaying their superiority. Madame Campan’s account of Marie’s entrance into the French court demonstrates how Marie did not even choose her own clothing, “The tire-woman was entrusted with the care of ordering materials, robes, and court dresses; and of checking and paying bills; all accounts were submitted to her, and were paid only on her signature and by her order, from shoes, up to Lyons embroidered dresses.” This passage is significant, because it demonstrates how little Marie Antoinette had to do with the actually handling and spending of money. It can be assumed that, at least at the beginning of Marie’s tenure in France, she had little control over the women in charge of her wardrobe and belongings.
There was money to be made by the royal attendants who looked after the queen. After outfits were deemed ready to be replaced, attendants benefitted financially from reselling them. Madame Campan wrote, “The tire-woman sold the castoff gowns and ornaments for her own benefit: the lace for head-dresses, ruffles, and gowns was provided by her, and kept distinct from those of which the lady of honor had the direction.” It is important to note that in this passage Campan is differentiating between the possessions under the control of the tire-woman and the lady of honor, the latter position held by Campan herself. A tire-woman apparently had access to money and a lot of clothing and other personal items. In this case, the tire-woman was in possession of a wardrobe that took up three large rooms. It is possible that the queen’s jewelry was also under her control. By all accounts, Marie Antoinette had a lot of jewelry. However, as she became more aware of the financial problems of the kingdom and the political unrest she stopped buying jewels, according to Campan. There was however, a scandal that attached itself to Marie, having to do with a huge diamond-necklace that was stolen and then sold in pieces. It is a convoluted story that appears to have many variations, in the end however, Marie was blamed for the outrage.
Spending on behalf of Marie and by Marie was certainly high. Campan explains that, for example, in a single season, Marie would have dozens of full dresses, undresses, fancy dresses, and petticoats made, all of which would be discarded at the end of the season. These would be some of the clothes the tire-women would be able to keep for herself or sell. This pattern of newly purchased gowns repeated for each season and was no doubt tremendously expensive. Campan estimates the expenditures on behalf of the young queen to have been in the amount of one hundred thousand francs annually at least. In order to draw some comparison, it is useful to look at what a servant at the time might be paid, approximately twenty-four francs a year.
Things reached a climax in 1789, when French peasants and laborers charged the Bastille prison and confiscated weapons and ammunition. Marie Antoinette’s longtime lover Count Axel von Fersen, tried to smuggle her, Louis XVI, and their children out of France, but the escape was foiled. Louis XVI signed a constitution but that was largely symbolic. By 1792, France was embroiled in a war with Austria and Prussia and he was receiving pressure to step down. France was overrun with riots and massacres. Eventually Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were arrested. In 1793, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were both executed by guillotine. Many historians have argued that Marie Antoinette was at least partly responsible for causing the riots and anti-monarchy sentiments that resulted in the French Revolution and violent overthrow of the French monarchy. Campan offers a different view. Campan’s writing supports the heartbreaking and homesick letters sent to her mother by Marie Antoinette when she was a young girl, dressed, washed, and afforded no privacy whatsoever by the ladies of the French court. Spending and lavish displays of wealth are also supported by Campan’s account. History explains in large part why there were so many nobles at court and why with such a dense population and no other respectable source of incomes, these women and men became courtiers. Taking care of the queen was a sort of industry by which a noble woman could legitimately make money, namely by buying and then reselling the queen’s wardrobe every season. If Marie seems frivolous because she paid so much attention to fashion, that may be looked at from another point-of-view, it was her job.
Bibliography
Appleby, Joyce Oldham. The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co, 2010.Campan. The Private Life of Marie Antoinette. Stroud, Gloucestershire: History Press, 2008.Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. "Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Genest Campan," academic.eb.com/EBchecked/topic/1233165/Jeanne-Louise-Henriette-Genest- Campan.Fordham University. “Modern History Sourcebook: Madame Campan: Memoirs of the Private Life of Marie Antoinette, 1818.” fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/1818marieantoinette.asp.Sée, Henri. Economic and Social Conditions in France During the Eighteenth Century. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, (1927), 1968.
