During the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI, maintained a lively correspondence with the Swedish Count Axel von Fersen – a close friend and possibly also a lover. In some of the letters that have survived to this day, however, some parts have been made illegible. What was there and who carried out the censorship, researchers have now revealed with the help of state-of-the-art technology.
After the storming of the Bastille and the widespread disempowerment of the French King Louis XVI. The French royal family was de facto under house arrest in their palace in the Tuileries in Paris from June 1791 to August 1792. Nevertheless, Marie Antoinette, the wife of Louis XVI, managed to maintain a secret correspondence with the Swedish Count Axel von Fersen. He was a close confidante of the queen, and according to some rumors, also her lover.
Puzzles around scribbled passages
Some of these letters have survived to this day. They were kept in the von Fersen family archives and were transferred to the French National Archives in 1982. Among the documents are letters from Marie Antoinette to Axel von Fersen, but also drafts of the letters that the count must have written back to her. However, in several letters, passages have been deliberately made illegible by being scribbled over with ink. Who carried out this censorship and which possibly incriminating passages should be hidden as a result, remains unclear to this day.
“Whether it was about state secrets, secret escape plans or a royal love affair, historians have been puzzling over it for almost 150 years,” explain Anne Michelin from the Sorbonne University in Paris and her colleagues. The problem with this: Because similar ink was used for the original text as well as for the overwriting consisting of tight circles, a separation with most common multispectral methods is hardly possible. Michelin and her team therefore took a different approach: They used X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to determine the elemental composition of the inks and uncover possible subtle differences.
Tell-tale formulations
In the analyzes of the overwritten parts in 15 letters, there were indeed slight differences in many places between the ink of the letter text and the covering scribbles. In particular, the copper-to-iron and zinc-to-iron ratios of the inks differed, the team reports. This made it possible to decipher some of the first words of the censored text passages with the help of computer-aided analysis. The unrecognizable passages concealed especially emotionally charged terms such as “love”, “beloved friend”, “dearest” or the sentence fragment: “You, whom I love and will love to my …”.
This could suggest that the censorship should primarily hide potentially incriminating evidence of a love relationship. However, Michelin and her colleagues also emphasize that so far only fractions of the censored passages have been deciphered. To add: “Even if we make the passages legible, we still cannot be sure that we know the true nature of their feelings, because the interpretation of texts is always a tricky thing,” writes the research team.
The count himself carried out the censorship
It is much clearer, however, who made the text passages in these letters unrecognizable: A graphological comparison of the fonts in combination with matches in the inks revealed that it must have been Axel von Fersen himself. Apparently he made handwritten copies of some of the letters he had received from Marie Antoinette, which he then censored himself. “He chose to keep the letters instead of destroying them. But the fact that he edited some sections suggests that he wanted to protect the Queen’s honor – or perhaps his own interests, “explain Michelin and her colleagues.
This becomes particularly clear at one point: In a letter from Marie Antoinette, von Fersen deleted the text passage “The letter of the 28th made me happy” and added the more objective wording: “The letter of the 28th reached me.” According to the scientists, this could indicate that von Fersen wanted to show these letters to third parties without compromising the queen or himself – possibly to get support for the planned escape of the royal couple from house arrest. “The analysis of all text sections made visible by historians and curators is currently still in progress,” says the team. What can ultimately be read from the deleted text passages must therefore first be shown.
Source: Science Advances, doi: 10.1126 / sciadv.abg4266