Read When the King Took Flight for Free Online Page B

dutifully copied down as a kind of royal catechism.' There can
be no doubt that he was deeply influenced by his religious training,
and that he took Christian piety and morality as seriously as any
French monarch of the early modern period. His tutor had him
vow "to imprint the precepts of my religion deeply into my heart,"
and throughout his life he attended mass daily and performed his
"Easter duties" year after year, as carefully noted in his diary. His
divine right to rule was clear and unquestioned: "I know that I owe
it to God for having chosen me to reign," he wrote on the first page
of his "catechism." And it was probably from the lessons of his tutors and from his sense of Christian duty and paternalism that he
acquired a firm belief in a king's responsibility to his people. "My
people should know that my first care and desire will be to relieve
and improve their condition ... The charity of the prince must be
modeled on the charity of God," a sentiment he reiterated both before and during the Revolution.' At the same time, he seemed to
feel a psychological need to be appreciated by his people and to receive their adulation for his efforts on their behalf. He was particularly affected by the popular reception he received at the time of
his coronation in Reims in 1775-one year after his ascension to
the throne-and he described his 1786 trip from Paris to the port city of Cherbourg, a paradelike carriage ride among the cheering
masses, as one of the happiest moments of his reign. To the end of
his life, he felt deeply pained if crowds failed to shout the traditional "Long live the king!" or if they did so with insufficient
vigor.'

    If he had picked up from his tutors and from his own readings
the Enlightenment emphasis on "utility" and the "general will," it
was clear that he understood such concepts in distinctly paternalistic terms. The king must consider the "general will" in making his
decisions, but it was the monarch's will that was the final arbiter, the
very "substance of the law."" And coexisting with his belief in the
king's responsibility for the welfare of the people, he retained a
keen sense of a hierarchical, aristocratic society of status and caste
that was far removed from the ethos of the Enlightenment. He was
clearly possessed of the same dual vision, the contradictory goalsof popular welfare on the one hand, and the maintenance of privilege and royal authority on the other-that bedeviled a whole generation if monarchs in the late eighteenth century, monarchs sometimes referred to as "enlightened despots." The intrinsic difficulties
of this divided objective were compounded by Louis' personality,
by a lack of self-confidence that seemed even to increase as time
went on. Torn both by a pathological uncertainty of his own judgment and by disagreements among his advisers-toward reform on
the one hand, and the preservation of authority and tradition on the
other-he frequently found decisionmaking an excruciating process. According to Madame de Tourzel, his children's governess,
who would accompany him to Varennes, he had "an exaggerated
lack of self-confidence, always persuaded that others understood
things better than he." "His heart," wrote Madame de Campan after
his death, "led him to see the truth, but his principles, his prejudices,
his fears, the clamoring demands of the privileged and the pious, intimidated him and brought him to abandon the ideas that his love
for his people had led him initially to adopt.""
    His sense of identity had been further complicated in 1770, when
state policy and the international system of alliances found him a
wife and a future queen. Marie-Antoinette was the second youngest of Austrian archduchess Maria-Theresa's sixteen children, and a
year younger than Louis himself. Graceful and attractive if not
beautiful, with her blond hair, her aquiline Hapsburg nose, and her
thick lower lip, she had received only the rudiments of an