Marie Antoinette and the Affair of the Diamond Necklace

“She was the victim of a vicious, shrewdly sustained process of character assassination from the moment she set foot in France, a sinister, carefully orchestrated campaign of calumny, which tried in particular to destroy her moral reputation. An intellectual climate fanatically hostile to traditional monarchy, and sheer human jealously, exploited the xenophobic hatred of her as an Austrian and her own aloofness to make her the scapegoat for all French ills."

Perhaps the most damning propaganda against Marie specifically and the monarchy in general was the “Affair of the Diamond Necklace” in 1785. 

Years before, the aged King Louis XV had ordered Charles August Böhmer, a Swiss jeweler, to make an elaborate and exceptionally expensive necklace, consisting of 647 diamonds of 2,800 carats, worth 1.6 million livres ($25 million today). The old king died before the necklace was completed, which left the Swiss jeweler distraught (and in debt). Louis XVI offered to purchase the necklace for Marie to give as a future wedding gift to their daughter, but Antoinette refused and said the money should be used instead to construct a warship. Böhmer demanded that the queen buy the piece, or he would commit suicide. Marie did not give in to the jeweler’s hysterics and suggested he break the necklace into smaller pieces in order to expedite its sale.  

At this stage, the saga turned bizarre, with the introduction of a “cast of characters” who “seemed perfect symbols of a regime worm-eaten with corruption.” The archbishop of Strasbourg, Cardinal Louis de Rohan, a gullible man desirous of the queen’s attention and favoritism, thrust himself into the story by offering to buy the necklace. The cardinal told Böhmer that the queen now wanted the piece and that he had been sent to acquire it for her. De Rohan had been convinced by Jeanne de La Motte, a charlatan, who hired an actress to portray the queen in an elaborate nighttime skit, where Marie supposedly told the cardinal she wanted the necklace. Additionally, de La Motte hired a forger to craft a letter from the queen to de Rohan about the necklace. Both duplicitous actions persuaded the cardinal that Marie needed him to acquire the precious piece.  

Ultimately, Böhmer gave the necklace to de La Motte, acting on behalf of the cardinal, who then fled to England and sold it. When the jeweler came to Versailles to demand payment, the plot was discovered, and de Rohan was publicly arrested as he processed to the Royal Chapel to celebrate Mass. King Louis XVI was irate and ordered the cardinal imprisoned in the Bastille. Eventually, the duped cleric was tried by the Paris Parlement but, to the surprise of Louis and Marie, found not guilty and acquitted.  

The public, kept abreast of the affair by press reports during the trial, blamed the queen for the entire episode. Opponents of Marie Antoinette used the “Affair of the Diamond Necklace” to transform public opinion against her so that she was seen by the people of France, both nobles and commoners alike, not as the beloved queen but as the “Austrian whore” who was concerned only about riches and ostentatious pieces of jewelry. Not only was the sordid affair a stain on Marie’s reputation, but it seriously damaged the legitimacy of the monarchy and the Church in popular opinion, as one councilor of the Paris Parlement remarked that the situation was a “nice little smear of dirt on both crown and crozier.”

Propaganda directed against the queen during her lifetime manifested into later myths about her concern for the French people suffering during the height of the financial crisis in the 1780s. The secular historical attack continues to posit the myth that Marie, when told about the plight of her French subjects, callously remarked, “Let them eat cake.” The phrase itself is poorly translated from the French, which includes the word brioche rather than gâteau (cake). Brioche was a pastry made with flour enriched with eggs and butter and thus more expensive than ordinary bread. 

But the difference between brioche and bread must be seen for the distraction that it is. The infamous quote remains fixed in the modern mind about Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI despite the fact the queen never uttered it. The insensitive remark was never attributed to her during her lifetime or the French Revolution. Post-Revolution secular historians used the false quote to portray a corrupt, evil, and morally decadent monarchy linked with the Church to preclude a return of the crown.  

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