Marie Antoinette on the hunt ( Public domain ) One of the most famous diary entries of all time consists of a single word: rien, which is French for “nothing.” It’s what King Louis XVI recorded on July 14, 1789, the day the Bastille was stormed. This entry (or lack thereof) is often cited as evidence of the king’s disinterest in the brewing revolution. The standard narrative about Louis is that he was simply not up to the task of dealing with the forces that threatened his throne. As a second son, he wasn’t initially raised to be king; it was only when his older brother died that he became the heir. The story goes like this. Louis was smart but incompetent. His deep introversion made him reluctant to perform the ceremonial roles of the monarchy. He was indecisive at key moments and mostly tried to avoid dealing with the issues that put his throne and life at risk. He greatly preferred messing around with locks and other little gadgets over dealing with the mounting debt and social unrest that surrounded him. So it’s fitting that he didn’t even register the pivotal moment at the beginning of the French Revolution. Well, yes and no. Louis’ diary wasn’t a normal diary in which he logged all of the important events in French politics, or even in his personal life. Instead, his diary had one purpose: to record the animals he killed. So, if you look at it one way, Louis shouldn’t be blamed for ignoring the revolution in his hunting journal. The fact that he didn’t hunt that day actually means that he was attending to affairs of state on July 14. But, if we look at Louis’ obsession with hunting from another angle, we can learn a lot about why the people of France eventually hunted him down and ended his life. The “royal hunt” is a tradition that goes back to the first states in places like Egypt, China, and Assyria. These were often more than hunting trips; they were elaborate rituals. Kings and their entourages would head out into the forest to kill animals for fun and to feed themselves, but there was more to it than that. As historian Philip Mansel puts it, There was a further reason for the popularity of royal hunts, in addition to the thrill of the chase, the assertion of sovereignty, and their appeal as a school of war. The fourth reason was a court’s need for mass entertainment. Royal hunts, as many cycles of pictures commissioned by monarchs prove, occupied large numbers of people and vast stretches of land, acquainting subjects with their rulers, and vice versa. They required guards; hunt servants; musicians (royal hunts were always accompanied by music); dog-keepers; beaters; the monarch and his companions; and spectators. Hunts were a form of mass sociability which became the rural equivalent of a court ball or royal opera: a means of serving the king’s pleasure and advertising his power. Royal hunts became so large and so frequent that they could change landscapes, road-networks, animal breeds (leading to the development or import of new breeds of horses and hounds for hunting), food supplies and, as John Christianson has written in an article describing Frederik II of Denmark (1559–88)’s transformation of his kingdom in the interests of his royal hunt, ‘the entire balance between the natural and human worlds’. Of all the monarchies that obsessed over the hunt, perhaps the most enthusiastic was the French monarchy. Several French palaces, including Versailles, which started out as a hunting lodge, were purposefully located near forests filled with game French royal hunts were huge affairs, involving hundreds of people and even more animals. Louis XIV kept hundreds of hunting dogs and 700 hunting horses at Versailles. He went hunting over 100 times a year while king, and even when he was ailing with gout, he had servants carry him around in a sedan chair for the hunt. But this paled in comparison to the amount of hunting Louis XVI undertook a century later. Even before he had become king, hunting was a central activity in his life. One story from his early years, of the “incident at Acheres,” gives a sense of the importance and impact of the royal hunts. In 1773, the year before he became king, Louis was out hunting with his retinue. The party chased a stag for miles; the animal eventually entered the village of Acheres and found itself trapped. Crazed, the stag attacked and gored a villager. The man’s wife saw the blood and passed out, thinking her husband was dead. But Marie Antoinette revived her, informed her that her husband would live, and gave her a generous amount of money. The story was cited as evidence of Marie Antoinette’s generosity toward the commoners, but it’s also evidence of the way the royal hunt (and the desires of the monarchs more generally) ran roughshod over everything else (in some versions of the Acheres story, the man is not wounded by a deer but by a horse in the royal retinue). Whatever the truth, it’s telling that Marie Antoinette’s act of basic human decency was considered in the royal court to be an unusual sign of kindness; it was the least the royals could do after invading this town and causing havoc in the pursuit of a little fun. Louis tallied his kills in his journal, and the entries give a sense of the scale of the slaughter. In 1774, his first partial year as king, he and his hunting parties killed 6,757 animals. This level of killing was just a hint of what was to come; in 1780, Louis had his most successful year of hunting, killing over 20,000 animals. In total, between 1774 and 1787, he and his companions killed 189,251 animals. Louis must have felt very proud of his hunting accomplishments. But I doubt his subjects were very impressed. While Louis and his companions were marauding through the forests, which were preserved and maintained for his exclusive use, the French economy was entering free-fall. The people of France were impoverished in the 1780s by a set of interlocking problems. The country was losing ground to English manufacturing as it began to experience the Industrial Revolution. The French government, which had long struggled with unsustainable levels of debt, had spent too much money supporting the American Revolution and found itself in deep trouble. And bad weather ruined crops, causing the price of bread to soar. Starvation stalked the people of France. So I doubt it charmed the French people that their king and his fancy retainers bagged over 17,000 animals in 1786 as they suffered through an unusually cold winter without enough to eat. When, a couple of years later, the price of bread soared so high that it cost most of a worker’s wages just to buy enough for his family to eat, it didn’t look great that Louis hunted twice a week at minimum. Once the revolution was underway, one of the first acts of the new National Assembly was to end the feudal system, including the system of hunting rights. Less than a month after Louis wrote “nothing” in his journal during the storming of the Bastille, he lost many of his exclusive hunting grounds: The exclusive right to hunt and to maintain unenclosed warrens is likewise abolished, and every landowner shall have the right to kill or to have destroyed on his own land all kinds of game, observing, however, such police regulations as may be established with a view to the safety of the public. All hunting captainries, including the royal forests, and all hunting rights under whatever denomination, are likewise abolished. Provision shall be made, however, in a manner compatible with the regard due to property and liberty, for maintaining the personal pleasures of the King. The president of the Assembly shall be commissioned to ask of the King the recall of those sent to the galleys or exiled, simply for violations of the hunting regulations, as well as for the release of those at present imprisoned for offenses of this kind, and the dismissal of such cases as are now pending. This was good news for the citizens of France, but very bad news for the animals in its forests. Newly free to hunt, the starving people of France descended on the royal hunting grounds to kill and eat everything in sight. Meanwhile, Louis refused to hunt, perhaps as an act of protest against his semi-captivity. It’s fitting, I suppose, that Louis’ reign ended with a sort of hunt. As the revolutionaries gained more power, Louis and his family became desperate. They felt trapped in their palace; a crowd had prevented the royals from heading to their palace at Saint-Cloud for Easter. Rather than remain in Paris, where they might have become constitutional monarchs, the royals resolved to escape. Panicked, the king and his family were sloppy and reckless in their escape, not so different from the stag that Louis and Marie Antoinette had pursued to Acheres 18 years before. The plan was that the royals would flee in the middle of the night, disguised as bourgeois merchants. But it was a mess from the start. Marie Antoinette got lost, which delayed their departure. Their carriage cracked a wheel against a bridge post, which required repairs. Meanwhile, Parisians realized that the king was gone, and fast riders spread the word to look out for their royal quarry. Within 24 hours of his escape, the National Guard had cornered the king in Varennes; he and his family would be escorted back to Paris. The procession moved at a walking pace; it took three days for the king to make it back to the capital. The “Flight to Varennes” was the breaking point in relations between the National Assembly and Louis. The new government would eventually dissolve the monarchy and execute Louis and Marie Antoinette. After being returned to Paris, Louis, in the unaccustomed role of prey rather than predator, made a journal entry. It was, like so many of them, pretty short. It read only “Five nights spent outside Paris.” Better than nothing, I suppose. This newsletter is free to all, but I count on the kindness of readers to keep it going. 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