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All this was exacerbated by the effects of the American war.
    Although the French secured a victory against England in the American War of Independence, aid to the Americans between 1776 and 1783 had added around 1.3 billion livres to the spiralling national debt. And there was another hidden cost of supporting America: the returning men, inspired by what they had seen overseas, brought back revolutionary ideas.
    During the Enlightenment of eighteenth-century France, writers like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau had set out radical new ideas in political philosophy. Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters of 1733 indicted the French system of government and were suppressed. He continued to challenge all manifestations of tyranny by the privileged few in church or state. Rousseau’s Social Contract, published in 1762, tackled the great themes of liberty and virtue and the role of the state, creating a new sense of possibilities and opportunities. Intellectuals began to reject established systems of government; “reason,” they argued, had greater value than the king’s claim to a “divine right,” and they no longer saw the monarch’s rights and privileges as unchallengeable. Political issues became much more widely debated in the salons and academies of Paris. Why support a system that had the great mass of the populace in chains to their abject poverty? Surely the people, rather than the king, should determine levels of taxation? Is a republic morally superior to a monarchy? Educated Frenchmen began to see in America’s Declaration of Independence a better model to follow. With the establishment
of the American constitution there was a practical alternative to the monarchy of France.
    The growing discontent with the government found a tangible focus in the popular press through the increasingly vitriolic portrayal of the queen. Although with the responsibilities of motherhood she had begun to moderate her earlier excesses and spent much time with her children, she had many enemies at court and the slanders continued unabated. In the streets of Paris, pornography, cartoons, prints and libelles poured out an endless barrage of spiteful criticism which, before long, became common truths throughout France. The production of these pamphlets was a commercial enterprise, and writers fought to outdo each other in their ever-more-out-rageous copy. The queen was portrayed as wildly frivolous and extravagant with no care for the welfare of her people. Much was made of her seven years of childlessness and she was accused of lesbian relationships, especially with her favorites, Gabrielle de Polignac, and the superintendent of the household, the Princesse de Lamballe: “In order to have children, Cupid must widen Aphrodite’s door. This Antoinette knows, and she tires out more than one work lady widening that door. What talents are employed! The superintendent works away. Laughter, games, little fingers, all her exploits proved in vain.”
     
    Even when she fulfilled her role as mother, she was portrayed as unfaithful, turning the king of France into a “perfect cuckold.”

    Our lascivious queen
With Artois the debauched
Together with no trouble
Commit the sweet sin
But what of it
How could one find harm in that?

    These calumnies demonizing the queen became increasingly explicit and obscene. The Love Life of Charlie and Toinette, published in 1779, outlines in graphic detail the “impotence of L------- whose matchstick … is always
limp and curled up,” and how “Toinette feels how sweet it is to be well and truly fucked” by Artois. In the pamphlets and libelles, the queen’s voracious sexual appetite required more than one lover; Fersen, Artois and others were implicated. There was even a fake autobiography, A Historical Essay on the Life of Marie-Antoinette, which first appeared in the early 1780s and proved so popular it was continually updated, purporting to be her own confession as a “barbaric queen,