February 2003
Research and Teaching

Mysteries of the French Revolution revealed

Historian Dr Munro Price unravels one of the last mysteries of the French Revolution in his new book 'The Fall of the French Monarchy, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and the Baron de Breteuil'.

Munro, of Languages and European Studies, spent months hunting down clues on the royal couple, his travels taking him across Europe. And his months of searching were not in vain.

He was looking for the answers to questions which have always remained a mystery, such as what really was Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette's attitude to the French Revolution? Were they prepared to end it by a moderate compromise or was their real aim to turn the clock back to 1789?

Munro said: "As an historian of Louis XVI and his reign, I had always been fascinated by the great mystery of his last years. The royal couple burnt most of their secret correspondence and what little is left - mostly letters from the Queen - is concerned with day-to-day survival. As a result, the true aims of Louis and Marie Antoinette, with all their importance for the history of the Revolution, remain impenetrable."

Among the deadly intrigue was one crucial but neglected figure - the King and Queen's secret advisor, the Baron de Breteuil. A conservative, he was brought to power by Louis to bring the increasingly volatile political situation under control in 1789. Forced to flee France after the storming of the Bastille, he then became the King and Queen's secret Prime Minister in exile, charged with their undercover plans for counter-revolution.

Left: Louis XVI in 1785 by Joseph Boze.

Through his research, Munro discovered that there were Breteuil descendants and that an archive existed in the family chateau outside Paris. The current head of the family was happy to help. Although Breteuil's household became the headquarters of the network he set up to rescue Louis and Marie Antoinette, the trail became cold. Although the archives covered Breteuil's colourful pre-revolutionary career, after 1789 there was a gap.

Yet Breteuil had an important agent and confidant - Marc-Marie, Marquis de Bombelles, his diplomatic protege and virtually his adopted son, for whom he had reserved the most important missions during the Revolution, first to the Austrian emperor Leopold II in Vienna and then to Catherine the Great in St Petersburg.

By a stroke of luck, while Munro was chasing clues in Stockholm and Vienna the first volumes began to appear of a diary Bombelles had kept from 1780 to 1822, which appeared to form part of a much bigger archive.

The Baron de Breteuil by the sculptor Augustin Pajou, commissioned in 1788 by the Academy of Science.

Munro said: "If Breteuil had been the King and Queen's secret confidant, Bombelles had performed the same function for Breteuil. If the key to Louis and Marie Antoinette's real intentions could still be found anywhere, it would have to be in this Bombelles archive. Finding this became my priority."

After months of searching, Munro finally traced Bombelles' last descendent, a Dutch diplomat in Paris whose mother had been a Bombelles. He revealed both the papers' location and their adventurous history. Originally moving from France to Croatia, they were sent for safekeeping to a cousin, Count Clam-Martinic, at his castle in Austria, when Hitler invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, where it had remained ever since. Munro contacted the present Count Clam and set off for Burg Clam, a formidable 11th century fortress perched on a rock near the Danube.

The archives were in a locked room up several flights of stairs along a corridor lined with antlers and stuffed animal heads. There were found 97 volumes of the famous diary, all in Bombelles' own hands, a large buff ledger containing all the despatches he had sent back to Breteuil from his missions during the Revolutions, and several cartons.

Amongst them was a crucial document that had always been thought lost, a memorandum Louis XVI had requested from Breteuil to guide his policy in the event of a successful escape from Paris, to be sent to Luxembourg to await his arrival on the French border. The escape's failure meant it had never been delivered. But if anything could reveal the thinking of the King and his most trusted advisor, this was it.

At its core was a plan to dissolve the elected revolutionary National Assembly the moment the King regained his freedom. The current view that the King intended to compromise with the Revolution when he left Paris now looks untenable.

The significance of this find has already been recognised by historians and reviewers. Antonia Fraser in the Sunday Times has called it "important and engrossing", while Robert Gildea in the Times Literary Supplement has said that the discovery "rekindles one's faith in the craft of the historian."

As Munro puts it: "An historical enigma has been solved. Louis and Marie Antoinette had never wanted to compromise with the Revolution. Their secret aim had been to crush it completely."

• 'The Fall of the French Monarchy, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and the Baron de Breteuil' is available from Macmillan (2002), priced £20, ISBN no: 0333901932. It can also be ordered from the University's Waterstone's bookshop.

11 February 2003

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