The Diamond Necklace Affair
Between 1784 and 1786, a confidence swindle involving a 1.6 million livre diamond necklace, a forged letter purportedly from Marie Antoinette, and the naïve ambition of Cardinal Louis de Rohan became the most damaging single scandal of the Ancien Régime's final decade. The swindlers — principally Jeanne de la Motte-Valois, who claimed an intimate friendship with the queen she had never met — convinced Rohan that Marie Antoinette wished him to purchase the necklace secretly on her behalf; Rohan signed promissory notes, the jewellers' instalments went unpaid, and in August 1785 the Cardinal was arrested on the feast of the Assumption as he prepared to celebrate Mass at Versailles, in front of the entire court. Although Rohan and the other defendants were acquitted by the Paris Parlement in May 1786, the trial's public proceedings made Marie Antoinette's alleged profligacy and arbitrary contempt for due process the dominant narrative — regardless of her actual innocence in the scheme. The affair was a crucial delegitimising event: it crystallised popular hostility toward the queen as 'Madame Déficit,' eroded what remained of the court's moral authority, and demonstrated that the Parisian public sphere would henceforth try the monarchy in the court of published opinion, directly prefiguring the revolutionary journalism of 1789.
- Year: 1785 CE
- Category: Political
