Cardinal de Rohan
Cardinal de Rohan was the Grand Almoner of France, prince-bishop of Strasbourg and head of one of the oldest houses in the kingdom, whom Jeanne de la Motte persuaded in 1784 that he could buy back the queen's favour, and who in January 1785 bought on credit in the queen's name a diamond necklace worth 1,600,000 livres and handed it to the swindler to deliver. Arrested in the Hall of Mirrors on Assumption Day in his pontifical robes, tried before the Parlement of Paris and acquitted in May 1786 to the cheers of the crowd, he was exiled to his abbey, and the verdict that he could reasonably have believed the queen would meet him at midnight in the gardens did Marie Antoinette more harm than anything she had done. He was born in 1734, coadjutor of Strasbourg at twenty-six, ambassador to Vienna in 1772, where his extravagance and his letters mocking Maria Theresa's partition of Poland earned him the empress's hatred and, through her, her daughter's. Recalled in 1774, he was nonetheless made Grand Almoner and cardinal by the influence of his family, and spent ten years trying to get the queen to speak to him. He was credulous and generous, kept the alchemist Cagliostro as a house guest, and believed the forged notes signed Marie Antoinette de France because he wanted to. The jewellers, unpaid in July 1785, went to the queen. The king, confronting Rohan on 15 August, asked him how he could have believed it, and the cardinal answered that he had been deceived. He was taken to the Bastille and chose trial by the Parlement, which the queen's party thought a mistake and which was the ruin of the crown's case: the judges, who disliked the court, acquitted him by twenty-six votes to twenty-two and sentenced only Jeanne, her husband and the forger. Louis XVI stripped him of the almonership and sent him to La Chaise-Dieu. He was elected to the Estates-General by the clergy of Alsace in 1789, refused the civil constitution of the clergy, and retired across the Rhine to the German part of his diocese at Ettenheim, where he died in February 1803, having resigned the see under the Concordat.
- Lived: 1734 CE – 1803 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: cardinal, bishop, courtier
