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In London, in November 1787, the philosophe Brissot was invited to attend Sharp’s Abolition Society. Brissot was supported by a free-spirited young playwright, Olympe de Gouges, who was also a member of the Orléans coterie. De Gouges had already started campaigning against slavery with her play L’Esclavage des noirs, but now published Réflexions sur les hommes nègres. Brissot was prompted to found a French Société des Amis de Noirs which was soon joined by de Gouges and the marquis de Lafayette.^* Brissot admired Jefferson, whom he knew well, and invited him to join the Amis de Noirs. ‘I’m very sensible of the honour,’ replied the ever-supple Jefferson on 11 February 1788. ‘You know nobody wishes more ardently to see an abolition not only of the trade but of the condition of slavery: and certainly nobody will be more willing to encounter every sacrifice for that object.’ But he refused because ‘it might render me less able to serve [the cause] beyond the water’. Orléans sent Saint-Georges to London to talk to Prinny and the abolitionists,^* but soon he was immersed in exploiting the deepening crisis faced by Louis and Antoinette. Behind the dazzle of the court, Louis was bankrupt – and he now took his greatest gamble.

REQUIEM: JOSEPH AND MOZART

Faced with his financial crisis, Louis embraced reform and summoned an assembly of Notables to demand real taxes for nobility and the empowering of the parlements. ‘The peasants pay everything,’ said the king, ‘the nobles nothing.’ His plan was not impossible but required the skilful building of a coalition. Instead Lafayette, American paladin, one of the Notables, attacked the court; the Notables rejected Louis’s reform, accelerating the credit crisis. Louis collapsed, his crack-up exacerbated by the death of their tiny daughter Sophie, nursed for weeks by the queen. The couple were both under terrible pressure. Louis turned up at Antoinette’s apartments in tears. She herself leaned on Fersen, with whom she corresponded in lemon juice or invisible ink.

Louis drew her into high politics. As Antoinette made cuts to court expenditure and virtually ran the government from her personal palace at Petit Trianon, confiding to her best friend Polignac that ‘The personage above me [Louis] is in no fit state,’ unrest spread. Treason started in the family and spread to the nobility: Orléans led a révolte nobiliaire that undermined the regime from within. Antoinette was blamed for everything in a spiral of conspiracy theories, denounced as Madame Déficit for her extravagance, La Austrochienne (Austro-bitch) for giving millions to the Austrians. Le Godmiché Royal (The Royal Dildo) and other pornographic pamphlets depicted her having sex with Yolande de Polignac.^* ‘Do you know a woman,’ she asked, ‘more to be pitied than me?’

The people demanded the return of Necker, the speculator whose wheeler-dealings had overpromised and worsened the crisis. Louis reluctantly reappointed Necker. ‘I tremble,’ admitted Antoinette. If Necker failed, ‘I’ll be detested even more.’ Necker kept the regime afloat by more borrowing, yet even the king realized that he now had no choice but to call the États Généraux. This elected assembly of nobles, clergy and commoners, which had prospered during medieval crises and not been called since 1614, would herald the end of the absolutist monarchy created by Richelieu, Mazarin and Louis XIV. ‘All men’s minds are in a ferment,’ noted Fersen. ‘Nothing’s talked of but a constitution. The women especially are joining in the hubbub …’

At Versailles, on 5 May 1789, the Estates met. Louis and Antoinette swiftly lost control as the Third Estate – filled with provincial lawyers outraged by Bourbon decadence – seized the initiative, swearing to create a constitution. Louis tried to dismiss it, but the Third Estate convened in a tennis court as the National Assembly, joined by the renegade Bourbon Orléans and the renegade noble Lafayette, who became Antoinette’s most hated traitors. Amid this nightmare, Louis and Antoinette were facing the greatest horror known to a parent: the dauphin died in agony of spinal TB, and Love Cabbage became the new heir.

In Paris, bad harvests threatened famine. A crowd shouting ‘Bread! Bread!’ stormed the Bastille prison, symbol of royal injustice and now of impotence, seized weapons, decapitated royal officials and terrorized the countryside. Louis’s only hope was to assume leadership of a liberal revolution himself. As troops guarded Versailles, the king’s brothers and many aristocrats fled into exile, but Louis dithered: ‘Do I stay or do I go? I’m ready for neither.’