On New Year’s Day in 1772, peace in Europe depended on whether a princess would lower herself to speak to a courtesan. The princess was Marie Antoinette, and the courtesan was Madame du Barry, who had become the official mistress of Marie Antoinette’s father-in-law, King Louis XV. France’s enemy-turned-ally Austria had just invaded Poland. Would France stand idly by and allow this violation of Polish sovereignty? Or would this aggression cause the alliance between Vienna and Versailles to collapse? As Austrian emissaries petitioned for France’s neutrality, their efforts faced a key obstacle: the obstinance of Marie Antoinette. She had offended Louis XV through her long campaign of silence against du Barry.
Marie Antoinette’s mother, the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, eventually intervened, writing directly to her daughter: “All that is expected is that you should say an indifferent word, should look at her beseemingly—not for the lady’s own sake, but for the sake of your grandfather, your master, your benefactor!” Days later, at the New Year’s greetings, Marie Antoinette turned to du Barry and, in view of all those at court, said, “Il y a bien du monde aujourd’hui à Versailles” (“There are many people at Versailles today”). With this, the crisis was averted. The great powers would be free to carve up Poland without France’s intervention. Peace would reign on the Continent, at least for a little longer.
The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s 1932 biography, Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman, recounts this episode in all its absurd detail, painting a portrait of an aristocratic elite that cannot fathom the dissolution of a dysfunctional old regime even as it occurs before their eyes. In a second biography, Mary Queen of Scots, Zweig is concerned with questions of legitimacy—what happens to a society when the state’s authority is habitually called into question, as Mary Stuart called into question Queen Elizabeth’s reign as a Protestant monarch. The two books felt to me like the perfect supplemental reading last month, amid news coverage of the trials of Hunter Biden and Donald Trump, as if Zweig were commenting on our time.
Zweig was that rare author who wrote across disciplines—fiction, memoir, biography. His books were wildly popular in the politically combustible 1930s. Instead of writing staid chronological biographies, Zweig offered a psychological examination of the two Marys, the societies they led, and the political forces that consumed them.
Zweig’s biographies remain consistently focused on the flawed characters at the center of great events. One point he drives home repeatedly is that the world often turns on what happens in the bedrooms of the powerful. This is hardly a new revelation (it dates at least to Helen of Troy). But we tend to discount it, choosing to believe that matters of state are principally determined publicly between marble columns as opposed to privately between tousled sheets.
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In the life of Marie Antoinette, the bedroom influenced affairs of state in ways more profound than her conflict with Madame du Barry. Her husband King Louis XVI’s sexual inadequacy had a profound impact on the destiny of France and the world. “Because he had been impotent in the privacy of the conjugal bed,” Zweig writes, “he became affected with inhibitions which robbed him in public life.” Even though Louis XVI eventually sired and raised children, Zweig argues that his early impotence had a disastrous effect not only on his marriage but on his reign. Without the confidence to check his ministers and wife, whose extravagance proved disastrous, Louis XVI was an ineffective monarch. At his death, Louis XV famously warned, “Après moi, le déluge.” According to Zweig, that déluge—the French Revolution, followed by Napoleon’s decades of conquest, and the shaping of a modern and post-monarchical Europe—might have been avoided had there been a little bit more of a deluge between Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
In America, political discourse that deals with sex is often seen as not just tawdry but also beside the point, adjacent to the matter but not the matter itself. However, the details of Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels’s tryst in a Lake Tahoe bedroom during a celebrity golf tournament could have seismic consequences, as could the escapades documented on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Empires, monarchies, and republics rise and fall on such issues. Sex matters as a political force. Zweig knew this. His books remind us to trivialize these scandals at our peril.
If Marie Antoinette suffered from not enough sex, Zweig’s other subject, Mary Stuart, may have suffered from too much. She was married three times. Her first husband, Francis II, made her queen of France. After his death at age 16, Mary returned to Scotland. Her second husband, Lord Darnley, would strengthen her claim to the English throne. Her third and last husband, Lord Bothwell, murdered her second husband and cost Mary the throne of both England and Scotland.
Mary Stuart was born a queen. Her father, King James V of Scotland, died when she was six days old. His final words prophesied that his daughter would be the last of his line to reign. A struggle to disprove her father’s dying words defined her life, and it was her misguided attempt to avoid this prophesy that, in tragic fashion, brought about its fulfillment. Mary’s journey, from legitimacy to illegitimacy, is the opposite of that of her great rival, her disinherited cousin Queen Elizabeth I.
Today, elections are easily undermined when political leaders sow doubt about their legitimacy. In Mary’s time, the issue was not an election, but a succession, and she proved adept at undermining Elizabeth. Mary’s supporters claimed that she was the true heir to the throne, as the great-granddaughter of Henry VII, England’s last Catholic king, while Elizabeth began her reign with a less secure grasp on power. Her father, King Henry VIII, declared her illegitimate after beheading her mother, his second wife, Anne Boleyn. Also, Elizabeth was a Protestant. Before there was foreign interference in elections, there was foreign interference in successions, and the Catholic monarchs of Europe incessantly plotted Elizabeth’s demise, using Mary as a proxy not only against Elizabeth but also against the Protestant Reformation sweeping Europe.
In his depiction of Mary, Zweig is less interested in passing judgment than in understanding the personal and political energies that consumed her and her subjects. “Passions, like illnesses, can neither be accused nor excused,” Zweig writes. “It is just as senseless to sit in judgment upon an individual who happens momentarily to be prey to an overwhelming passion as it would be to call a thunderstorm to account or wish to hold an assize upon the eruption of a volcano.”
Mary’s passions caused her to act against her own interests for much of her reign. At every turn, she called Elizabeth’s legitimacy into question, ensuring the antipathy of her ever more powerful rival in ways that ultimately led to her own demise. Today, American politics is awash with passions. Our culture is designed to inflame them. Reason seems to have left the stage. Passion in politics can be a positive force, but Zweig’s biography of Mary reminds us that our passions often serve as the chief conspirator against our best interests.
Ultimately, Marie Antoinette and Mary Stuart fell victim to larger political forces. For Marie Antoinette, that force was the revolution, the vulgar sansculotte populists who ushered in the Terror and eventually the French Republic. For Mary Stuart, it was the unification of the English and Scottish thrones under Queen Elizabeth’s single banner, a political entity that became known as Britain.
Zweig, like most historians, noted that each of these women met her death with resignation and dignity. In the days before Marie Antoinette’s execution, she wrote, “Tribulation first makes one realize what one is.” Mary Queen of Scots, with her death imminent, adopted the credo “En ma fin est mon commencement” (“In my end is my beginning”), embroidering this onto her garments.
Although dignity matters for posterity, it matters little in politics. When Marie Antoinette’s guillotined head was held up to the crowds in the Place de la Révolution, few cared about her newfound self-awareness, and the gruesome spectacle was met with cries of “Long live the Republic!” When Mary Stuart’s executioner lifted her severed head up to the crowd gathered at Fotheringhay Castle, Zweig describes a similarly macabre scene: “He gripped only the wig, and the head dropped onto the ground. It rolled like a ball across the scaffold, and when the executioner stooped once more to seize it, the onlookers could discern that it was that of an old woman with close-cropped and grizzled hair.”
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The two Marys, united in death, have a message for us, one Zweig surely wished had been heeded in his time. When it comes to politics, don’t ignore the passions of the moment, but don’t overindulge them either. It’s best to stay calm, stay measured, walk the center road, and not lose one’s head.
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