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
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