Courtly behaviour

November 9, 2013 7:20 PM

I have just finished Atoinia Fraser s biography on Marie Antoinette, and she talks in the beginning about the inter-relation of the French court with other European courts, esp. Holland and Austria, but also to a lesser extent England. She then talks about when Louis and Marie fled, they didn't seek aid in those courts, and none of those courts intervened explicitly or implicitly in rescuing the queen or her children. What's up with that?
posted by PinkMoose to Education (6 answers total)

Uhhh...well France suffered the lost of New France in the Americas to the British just a few decades hence in the Seven Years war and aided the American revolutionaries, without which the U.S War for independence might not have succeeded. the French Reolution look place shortly after, and cross pollinated with the recent U.S one. so Britian was so not feeling exiled French nobility right now.
posted by The Whelk at 8:23 PM on November 9, 2013

Also I believe it was Marie asking for the help of her Austrian relatives during the protests, who took it as an opportunity to seize recently lost land, that helped flame anti-monarch sentiment, meant they could not retreat to Austria but I'm not totally sure.
posted by The Whelk at 8:29 PM on November 9, 2013

Best answer: Marie and Louis were caught trying to flee France for Austria with the help of her Austrian relatives. But then they were brought back to Paris and convicted of treason and then the Revolution was really on. I think the rest of Europe was shitting themselves worrying that messing with it would give their own populace some ideas.
posted by marylynn at 8:32 PM on November 9, 2013 [1 favorite]

A quick reading of Wikipedia says Holland had its own revolutionary-tinged movements going on, so I figure the Royal Couple were a political hot potato.
posted by The Whelk at 8:36 PM on November 9, 2013

Re the English, the French had only stopped supporting the Jacobites less than 30 years prior to the Revolution, after having harbored and financed them intermittently for sixty years or so. I doubt the Hanoverians were very positively disposed towards them.
posted by ereshkigal45 at 11:59 PM on November 9, 2013

Best answer: Pretty much the same thing that happened in Russia: on the one hand, family members elsewhere (in Austria or Britain) might have wanted to help Czar Nicholas II and his family, but on the other hand they didn't want to either import revolution to their own countries or risk angering the leaders of the Russian revolution into attacking in any way.

Plus in both cases, Louis/Marie Antoinette and Nicholas/Alexandra, you've got to consider the makeup of both couples: neither king nor czar was realistically physically able to leave their country, and both queen and empress were (fairly or not) viewed as evil interlopers who were probably spying for their birth countries and who were blamed for the political upheaval. Neither queen nor empress was willing to leave without the husband they loved, neither king nor czar was strong-willed enough to force their wife to leave without him; neither couple was willing to send their children away without their parents..... so both families stayed together, and both families met disaster as a whole, even when they had chances to save some people if not all.

Britain's king, for instance, was willing to permanently shelter Alexandra and the four grand duchesses, but not Nicholas or their son: that would have been too politically risky *for Britain*. With Marie Antoinette, their children would have been permitted into Britain, but definately not the king and possibly not Marie Antoinette herself.
posted by easily confused at 2:58 AM on November 10, 2013 [4 favorites]