THE COUNTESS OF COUNTER-REVOLUTION: MADAME DU BARRY AND THE 1791 THEFT OF HER JEWELRY Erik Braeden Lewis Thesis Prepared for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS December 2015 APPROVED: Michael V. Leggiere, Major Professor Marijn S. Kaplan, Minor Professor Nancy L. Stockdale, Committee Member Richard B.
McCaslin, Chair of the Department of History Costas Tsatsoulis, Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Lewis, Erik Braeden. The Countess of Counter-Revolution: Madame du Barry and the 1791 Theft of Her Jewelry. Master of Arts (History), December 2015, 169 pp. Jeanne Bécu, an illegitimate child from the Vaucouleurs area in France, ascended the ranks of the Ancien régime to become the Countess du Barry and take her place as Royal Mistress of Louis XV.
During her tenure as Royal Mistress, Jeanne amassed a jewel collection that rivaled all private collections. During the course of the French Revolution, more specifically the Reign of Terror, Jeanne was forced to hatch a plot to secure the remainder of her wealth as she lost a significant portion of her revenue on the night of 4 August 1789. To protect her wealth, Jeanne enlisted Nathaniel Parker Forth, a British spy, to help her plan a fake jewel theft at Louveciennes so that she could remove her economic capital from France while also reducing her total wealth and capital with the intent of reducing her tax payments. As a result of the theft, her jewelry was transported to London, where she would travel four times during the French Revolution on the pretext of recovering her jewelry.
This thesis examines her actions while abroad during the Revolution and her culpability in the plot. While traveling to and from London, Jeanne was able to move information, money, and people out of France. Jeanne was arrested and charged with aiding the counter-revolution, for which the Revolutionary Tribunal sentenced her to death. Madame du Barry represented the extravagance and waste of Versailles and of Bourbon absolutism, and this symbolic representation of waste was what eventually inhibited Jeanne’s success.
Copyright 2015 By Erik Braeden Lewis ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page COPYRIGHT PAGE. MADAME DU BARRY From Courtesan to Countess.10 Madame du Barry at Versailles.16 The Countess at Court.22 Life after Louis XV. MADAME DU BARRY AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Absolutism and the Ancien régime.34 Reasons for Revolution. MISTRESS OF MISFORTUNE Major Characters.62 The Lady Goes to London.68 Jeanne’s Final Voyage.
MADAME DU BARRY GOES TO TRIAL Madame du Barry Arrested.83 Interrogation and Trial.87 Considering the Chargers. CONCLUSION The End of an Era.102 Du Barry in Context.162 iii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION During the reign of Louis XV, Jeanne Bécu, the Countess du Barry, was the last maîtresse-en-titre, or Royal Mistress, of the Kingdom of France during the Ancien régime, as Louis XVI never took a mistress.1 She occupied the position of official mistress from 1769 until 1774; it was this “position which gave her privileges and powers of which she may not have been aware.”2 These privileges included private apartments, a stipend, and the payment of previous gambling debts.3 Furthermore, as Royal Mistress, she could host meetings between the king and the ministers of his government in her apartments.4 Consequently, she gained the ability to influence the king in political matters, as will be seen with her involvement in the dismissal of Étienne François, the Duke de Choiseul. More importantly, however, was her ability to secure a significant source of capital in the form of fine jewelry and land, which came with châteaux and manorial dues. A woman of humble background, Jeanne established her fortune on these material possessions.
Her love for material possessions, which surmounted her self-love and joy for life, was central to the events that led to her demise. The desire to preserve her wealth and status entangled her in an international smuggling affair that ended with her execution during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution. 1 The historical consensus is that Louis XVI had multiple medical conditions such as phimosis and being hypogonadal. Boorjian and Ryan N.
Fogg, “The Sexual Dysfunction of Louis XVI: A Consequence of International Politics, Anatomy, or Naïveté?” BJU International, 106, no. 2 Joan Haslip, Madame du Barry: The Wages of Beauty (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 37. 3 Jeanine Huas, Madame du Barry (Paris: Tallandier, 2011), 85. 4 Huas, Madame du Barry, 85.
1 On the night of 10-11 January 1791, the most precious diamonds, jewels, necklaces, and other pieces of jewelry in Madame du Barry’s collection were stolen from her château at Louveciennes outside of Versailles while she was visiting Paris for the evening. This represents the story as the Countess wanted to tell it. Regardless, from the moment news of the theft diffused to the public, the infamous name of Madame du Barry, mistress to the previous king, was reintroduced to the memories of the French masses in the midst of revolution. Due to the events at Versailles and Paris that ended the Ancien régime, and most specifically because of the abolishment of feudalism and manorialism on the night of 4 August 1789, du Barry had an obvious motive: reduce the value of her estate and therefore the amount of taxes she owed to the French government.
However, motive does not mean guilt and an in-depth study is necessary to determine whether the theft was a genuinely misfortunate event or the result of a master scheme involving conspirators across the English Channel at a time when communication and movement were limited and monitored by the French government. The theories as to what actually happened are as abundant as the number of jewels in Madame du Barry’s collection. An approach lacking curiosity might suggest that Madame du Barry was a victim of a crime that just happened to be perpetrated against her in the most unfortunate of times and scenarios. Stanley Loomis, in Du Barry: A Biography, asserts that “[t]here cannot be the slightest doubt that Madame du Barry was the victim of an audacious robbery.”5 Loomis maintains that only the robbers, and most likely the Swiss Guard, Joseph Badoux, who was tasked with monitoring “the exterior of 5 Stanley Loomis, Du Barry: A Biography (Philadelphia: J.
2 the château,” were involved in the theft.6 This implies that she was an innocent victim. More importantly, it suggests that during the trips to London that she took, du Barry refrained from breaking any French laws regarding contact and aid for the French émigrés in London. A second school of thought tells a different narrative. Accordingly, Madame du Barry remained an innocent victim, while the theft was the master plan of Nathaniel Parker Forth, the mysterious British agent who hired Zamor, her Bengalese valet, and Badoux, the Swiss Guard charged with protecting her residence, as well as five thieves who committed the actual offense.
According to this version, Forth planned the heist with the thieves and without Jeanne’s knowledge. In Madame du Barry, René de La Croix, the Duke de Castries, notes the habitual presence of Forth at Louveciennes, the existence of Forth’s own private police force, and Forth’s discovery of the jewelry’s location before the French police. Castries used the evidence of Forth’s chronic appearance in the progression of events surrounding the jewel theft as evidence to support his assertion that Forth was the one who orchestrated the theft.7 Furthermore, by placing full culpability on Forth for organizing the theft, Castries directly implies that du Barry was innocent, at least up to this point, of any conspiracy. In Le destin de Madame du Barry, Jacques Levron admits that it is impossible to refute the claim that the theft was planned by an insider.
He argues that Madame du Barry’s response of having Badoux arrested is sufficient evidence that she was unaware of the plan and genuinely distraught by the 6 Lord Frederick Spencer Hamilton and others, eds., “In the Library: The Mystery of the Du Barry Diamonds,” The Pall Mall Magazine, no.com/books?id=BqPQAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA308&ots=ej_5g3quM4&dq=Joseph%20 Badou&pg=PA308#v=onepage&q=Joseph%20Badou&f=false. 7 René de La Croix, Duc de Castries, Madame du Barry (Paris: Hachette, 1967), 231.8 This would suggest that Forth, because of his knowledge of Louveciennes and acquaintance with du Barry’s employees, devised the plan around her. Forth sought to entrap Jeanne and use her to transport funds and communication to and from London, which in turn frustrated the French government, his ultimate task. This theory completely ignores the fact that Jeanne had been trying to reduce her income, which was her ultimate goal at the time.
While plausible, this argument begins to unravel in light of her actions in London. Furthermore, it is unlikely that Forth was able to rally Jeanne’s employees without her knowledge. Consequently, neither du Barry nor Forth were cognizant of the theft planning, or both were the masterminds who orchestrated the plot. A more tenable theory is that Madame du Barry and Forth planned this theft together.
She desperately needed to reduce her income; he was to act as the British catalyst for unrest and commotion in France. Joan Haslip, in describing this situation, states: “There can be little doubt that Forth was an agent spying in France on behalf of the British government and assisting French royalists in escaping from the country. Madame du Barry and her jewels were a useful cover for underground activities.”9 Thus, both had a motive and the means to enact the scheme. This theory claims that du Barry and Forth utilized her employees at Louveciennes, as well as the thieves, and quite possibly even the jewelers and bankers in both France and Britain, in a master conspiracy against the French that was hatched by the British government.
According to Agnes, Baroness de Stoeckl, in Mistress of Versailles, this plan ultimately resulted in du Barry providing funds for the royalist cause by aiding the British struggle against the French 8 Jacques Levron, Le destin de Madame du Barry (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1961), 131, 134. 9 Joan Haslip, Madame du Barry: The Wages of Beauty (Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1992), 161. 4 Revolutionary governments during the War of the First Coalition (1792-1797).10 Accordingly, the theft provided her a reason to file a claim with the French government to reduce her taxes. Then, with Forth’s knowledge of the British legal system, she could reclaim her jewels at a later date.11 Taking into consideration the fact that the jewels were so crucial for her to maintain her standard of living, it is unlikely that she would risk losing the majority of them.
However, it is possible that Jeanne asserted that a different collection of jewels was stolen.