John Hardman > Quotes

“Vermond did not consider his charge an obvious beauty – ‘one can find features more conventionally pretty’ – but she had poise and charm. He was most worried by her short stature, which he mentions three times, regarding it as the only obstacle to her appearing regal. The dauphin, on the other hand, had outgrown the strength he would later have, inherited from his Saxon grand-father Augustus the Strong, and was nearly six foot tall. So Vermond was pleased to report on 14 October 1769 that ‘between 13 February and 5 October she had grown 15 lignes in French measurements’. Marie-Antoinette had an oval face, a slight Habsburg jaw, brilliant blue eyes and a porcelain complexion. Opinion varies as to the colour of her hair. The historians Paul and Pierrette Girault de Coursac called it ‘ruddy brown with deep streaks of agate’,10 whereas later portraits show it to be blonde. Auburn is nearest.”
― John Hardman, Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen

“But somewhere deep inside him a glass tube clanked.”
― John Hardman, The Life of Louis XVI

“But Louis XV, in arguably the biggest single blunder of his reign, capitulated to clerical pressure and to specious arguments such as the ‘donation of Constantine’, whereby the first Christian emperor had given land to the church unencumbered and in perpetuity. The problem did not go away: clerical resistance to taxation was to defeat Louis XVI’s major reforming initiative too.”
― John Hardman, The Life of Louis XVI

“For centuries France and the Habsburgs had been enemies, as they had during the War of the Austrian Succession that had just ended (1748). But slowly the recognition was dawning on Maria-Theresa and her chancellor Kaunitz, and on Madame de Pompadour and, with less conviction, her lover Louis XV, that they were less threatened by each other than by the emergent powers of England (which was struggling with France for empire in India, North America and the West Indies) and Prussia (which had seized and so far kept Silesia).”
― John Hardman, Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen

“The king had retained full consciousness to the last. At a pause in the death rattle, his confessor asked him whether he was in much pain. ‘Ah! Ah! Ah! Beaucoup,’ Louis replied. ‘As long as I live,’ the abbé recalled, ‘those three Ahs! will stick in my memory.’ A valet snuffed out a candle that had been placed in a window to signal the king’s passing. Immediately there was a mighty roar, like a thunder roll, or the crashing of a series of mighty waves. It was the stamp of courtiers’ feet as they rushed headlong from the king’s ante-chamber to those of the dauphin – the sound of power escaping from a vacuum. For as the Great Chamberlain announced in the salon of the Oeil-de-Boeuf, ‘Messieurs, le roi est mort! Vive le Roi.”
― John Hardman, Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen

“who went on to write one of Louis XVI and a good synography of Robespierre. They”
― John Hardman, The Life of Louis XVI

“In January 1771 the ‘revolution’ occurred when the Parlement was dissolved and its members were sent into exile to disagreeable spots, one of which was so obscure that it could not be found on the map. The Grand Conseil, an offshoot of the king’s council, became the new Parlement, quickly dubbed ‘le Parlement Maupeou’ which, according to its many enemies, paved the way for unbridled despotism. For years the king’s effigy on the coins had remained unchanged as a man of thirty, the most handsome man in his kingdom. In 1771 it was updated so that he now appeared as a grim old tyrant.”
― John Hardman, Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen

“Marie-Antoinette only had two intense friendships in her life and neither came from the ranks of the high nobility crowded together at Versailles. One was Axel von Fersen, a Swedish nobleman attached to the French court; the other was Yolande de Polastron, comtesse and later duchesse de Polignac. A third, perhaps, was Antoine Barnave, the Revolutionary politician with whom she directed the government of France in the last months of 1791.”
― John Hardman, Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen

“The Rohan were distantly related to the semi-sovereign dukes of Brittany, whose last duchess had brought the territory to Charles VIII as a dowry in 1491. As such they managed to enjoy a rank between that of the dukes and the princes of the blood. Their motto was: ‘Roi ne puis, duc je daigne, Rohan suis’ (‘I cannot be king but despise the title duc; I am a Rohan’). Male members of the family were automatically invested with the Order of the Saint-Esprit on reaching their majority.”
― John Hardman, Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen

“Marriage of course was usually an instrument of policy for all the dynasties of Europe but especially that of the House of Austria whose old motto was ‘Bella gerant alii, tu Felix Austria nube’ (‘Other nations prosper by warfare, thou Austria by marriage’).”
― John Hardman, Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen

“During the revolutionary period, Marie-Antoinette’s stance was markedly less ‘reactionary’ than is generally thought. Nor at first was she wholly opposed to the growing demands of the Third Estate in 1788–9. In the aftermath of the royal family’s flight to Varennes and their forced return to Paris, it will be argued that Marie-Antoinette made sincere and concerted efforts to make the constitutional monarchy work during the last year of its life, between July 1791 and January 1792.”
― John Hardman, Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen

“Vermond talks of his pupil’s ‘légèreté’ (frivolity) – a word many will apply to her. One observer thought her unpopularity in 1787 undeserved since all she could be taxed with was ‘légèreté’. In the context I translate it as ‘flightiness’, perhaps mingled with a certain insouciance that led to the invention of the let-them-eat-cake story. But the Coursacs find a deeper meaning in the word ‘légèreté’. They equate it with ‘a nervous almost pathological instability’ and detect it in her sisters Amelia and Caroline.11 ‘Frenetic’ is a closer translation and we shall observe that trait in the almost desperate pleasure-seeking that characterized her first years as queen.”
― John Hardman, Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen

“Marie-Antoinette was, at least on her father’s side, as much French as anything. Her father, Francis, had been duke of Lorraine and her grandmother was the sister of the duc d’Orléans, regent for Louis XV. Francis spoke French and refused to learn German when he married her mother, Maria-Theresa, daughter of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, Charles VI. A host of Lorrainer nobles had flocked to Vienna in the wake of Francis as they would to Paris in the wake of his young daughter. The Habsburg court, as became a polyglot empire, was trilingual or even quadrilingual: Spanish because the Habsburgs had ruled that country and Charles had tried to get it back; Italian because they had possessions in the peninsula; German because that was what the natives spoke; and French because it was the universal language. Marie-Antoinette spoke French as her first language but with a German accent and many Germanisms.”
― John Hardman, Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen