By Gregory Afinogenov

For most readers with any interest in the revolutionary era, the French Restoration can be summed up with Talleyrand’s dictum that “the Bourbons learned nothing and forgot nothing.” In this view, Louis XVIII returned to power in 1814 (and again in 1815) expecting to be able to wind back the clock to the old regime, albeit with a charter of rights unwillingly granted at the behest of the allied occupying powers, but this anachronistic aspiration ultimately collapsed in the face of a French society transformed by three decades of upheaval. This interpretation is badly misleading, as Restoration scholars have long been at pains to point out: the Bourbons engaged wholeheartedly with their new political environment and tried to make their subjects remember the traumas of the revolution, generating new forms of mass politics in the process. ^[1] But another integral part of the Bourbon politics of memory was their representation of their years in exile—a period which helped them to create an ideological link with the early years of the Bourbon dynasty, the era of Henri IV (whose statue on Pont-Neuf Louis rebuilt in 1818) and his son Louis XIII.

Jean-Charles Tardieu, Louis XVIII couronne la rosière de Mittau, 1817

To understand how the Bourbons tried to do this, we can look at what appears at first glance to be an unexceptional product of the Restoration: a large (over a meter wide) painting by Jean-Charles Tardieu entitled Louis XVIII couronne la rosière de Mittau, 1799, created in 1817 for display at Versailles.^[2] Unsurprisingly, its subject figure is Louis XVIII himself, along with other surviving Bourbons such as the Duc de Berry and the Duc d’Angouleme. But the closer we look, the stranger the painting appears. This strangeness helps understand the painting’s unusual ideological strategy.

The setting is “Mittau, 1799.” You won’t find Mittau on a contemporary map. It is clearly not in France. It seems intuitively like a German placename—like Spandau, perhaps?—but we’re not in Germany either. Type “Mittau” into Google Maps, and you see an apparently unrelated town in Latvia:

Contemporary map of Jelgava, Latvia, formerly known as Mittau

A little more Googling and it turns out this is right. Mittau is Jelgava’s old German name: it was once the capital of the Duchy of Courland, whose German-speaking nobility subsequently played an important role in the Russian Empire when it annexed this territory in 1795. (Before that, Courland was a minor but assertive East European power. In the seventeenth century, the duchy even attempted to colonize the island of Tobago in the Caribbean and the mouth of the Gambia in West Africa.) 

But what on earth does all this have to do with Louis XVIII? Even ChatGPT is at a loss:

ChatGPT doesn’t know its history.

Classic ChatGPT! In fact, as many people at the time knew, Louis XVIII lived in Courland from 1798 to 1801, and then again from 1805 to 1807. Though he claimed the title of king after the death of the child Louis XVII in Jacobin custody, his stay there was part of a string of European places of exile. He obviously could not return to France, but his presence was also inconvenient to other European powers, who found that it constrained their diplomatic freedom of action. With meager resources, the would-be king and a handful of his most loyal courtiers relocated from place to place throughout the revolutionary period. After unhappy sojourns in Verona and Blankenburg, Louis received an invitation from Russia’s new emperor Paul I to move to his own domains in 1798.^[3]

Paul’s invitation was grounded in his sincere belief in the need to destroy the Jacobin menace and uphold the honor of European monarchical and aristocratic tradition. He provided Louis with a rather generous (though never fully sufficient) stipend and the use of the palace of the Dukes of Courland in Mittau. Tardieu’s fanciful reconstruction owes more to his own image of a semi-barbaric Eastern Europe than to the actual reality of this palace, which was in fact a mini-Versailles as were so many other such palaces in the region:

Author photo of the ducal palace in Jelgava, Louis’s residence in 1798-1801

Not all was well in Mittau, however. While the palace was superficially glitzy, a fire had destoyed much of it before the Russian annexation and had never been fully repaired. Louis’s court produced resentment in the town, whose administration was squeezed out of its buildings by the need to quarter his retinue. When Louis’s queen Marie-Therèse arrived a year later, she was so unhappy about being separated from her longtime companion (and likely lover) the Madame de Gourbillon that she caused a public scandal that became widely known at court.

There were also tensions between the two monarchs. Paul was paranoid about the threat of a noble uprising like the one that brought his mother Catherine II to the throne and led to the assassination of his father Peter III. The charged revolutionary atmosphere of the 1790s further amplified his fear. The French king’s correspondence and contacts, like those of almost all senior aristocrats in the empire, were rigorously surveilled; Courland and its neighboring province of Livland, with its major port of Riga, were home to one of the empire’s most zealous censorship committees, which even investigated Louis’s own library for subversive Enlightenment ideas. While Louis was conscious of the fact that he had few other options and so maintained a brave face, his representative at court in St. Petersburg became embroiled in an intrigue that severely undermined his relationship with the emperor. In the dead of winter in 1801—shortly before being assassinated in the palace coup he had feared for so long—Paul ordered Louis and his entire court to leave the Russian Empire on one day’s notice. 

While Louis would return to Courland (albeit as a guest in a much more modest manor house) under Paul’s son and heir Alexander I, it was his first stay that established the mythos of royal exile. In the fabricated Memoirs of Louis XVIII, the writer Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon presented a picture of a court that preserved its ancient Bourbon dignity in the barely civilized Russian environment.^[4] Our sole authentic testimony from an outside contemporary, the fiercely monarchist Courland baron von Heyking, shows a less flattering side. The chamberlain the Duc de Villequier’s “height not being much greater than a dwarf’s, his intelligence [Geist] was on the same level, but he was courteous and honest.” The king’s closest advisor Saint-Priest “joined to his great arrogance all the forms and pretensions of a minister from Versailles and was all the more out of place there in Mitau … the king himself seemed more to fear than love him.” At dinner, “the old Cardinal de Montmorency sat across from me and threw me into astonishment, both with the resonance of his surname and with the capacity of his belly: he didn’t eat so much as gorged himself.”^[5] Though Heyking was inclined to be sympathetic, especially since he himself had been exiled from St. Petersburg to his country estate, it was clear that Louis’s court replicated many faults of the old regime.

Tardieu’s painting, along with other works from the Restoration period, attempted to tell a different story, one in which Louis’s exile had renewed the ancestral virtue of the Bourbon dynasty. This brings us to the most puzzling aspect of the painting: its central figure, the rosière or “rose-girl.” As Sarah Maza has shown, the ritual of crowning a rosière had become a popular set-piece in pre-revolutionary France. It originated in a Picard village ritual in which a local community chose the most virtuous local maiden, and the seigneur formally upheld its election by crowning her. As a staging of intimate unity between people and seigneur, it was also linked to the Bourbon heritage because of the role of Louis XIII, the second Bourbon monarch, who had supposedly sent a blue ribbon to confirm the election of the first rosière.^[6]

In fact, there is no evidence that any such ritual ever took place in Mittau, nor was there ever a rosière to be found. The closest thing to such an event was the wedding between the Duc d’Angouleme (second in line for the throne after his father, the future Charles X) and his cousin, Louis XVI’s daughter Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, in 1799. Indeed, the large festive gathering depicted here echoes descriptions of the nuptials.  But whereas the real event was an awkward demonstration of the monarchy’s limited prospects in an era when marriageable non-consanguineous partners of equal rank were unavailable, the fictionalized Mittau in Tardieu’s representation stood in for a rural Arcadia of purity and virtue—a time in the wilderness that ultimately served to confirm the divine right of the Bourbons to rule.  Tardieu’s restaging of the rosière ritual in the unlikely setting of provincial Latvia was accompanied by a narrative livret in which, as the king places the garland upon her head, the rose-girl whispers to him, “May God return it to you.” 

To make their case as legitimate rulers of France, the Bourbons had to somehow make sense of the fact that for over twenty years they had been the laughingstocks of Europe, neglected and abused even by the powers who claimed to act in their name. Tardieu’s painting was one way to turn these lemons into lemonade: far from impairing their claim to the throne, it said, the years in the wilderness helped the Bourbons relearn the lessons of the past and earn their power once more. In making this case, it elided many of the squalid details of real life at Mittau.

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Gregory Afinogenov is Associate Professor of Imperial Russian History at Georgetown University. His first book, Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power, was published by Harvard University Press in 2020. His current project, In Search of Restoration, looks at the fragile alliance between Russian and European aristocratic elites as they sought an alternative vision of politics after the French Revolution.

Title Image: Jelgava Palace at night. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Endnotes:

^[1] Sheryl Kroen, Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 1815-1830, 1st ed. (University of California Press, 2000),; Emmanuel de Waresquiel, Histoire de la Restauration, 1814-1830: naissance de la France moderne (Paris: Perrin, 1996); David Skuy, Assassination, Politics and Miracles: France and the Royalist Reaction of 1820 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003).

^[2] See the description by Barthélemy Jobert and Pascal Torrès at https://histoire-image.org/etudes/louis-xviii-couronne-rosiere-mittau-1799.

^[3] The classic study is Ernest Daudet, Les Bourbons et la Russie pendant la Révolution française (d’après des documents inédits)(Paris: Librairie Illustrée, 1886).

^[4] Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon, Mémoires de Louis XVIII (Paris: Mame-Delaunay, 1832), 7:218ff.

^[5] Friedrich Bienemann, Aus den Tagen Kaiser Pauls: Aufzeichnungen eines kurländischen Edelmanns (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1886), 157–65.

^[6] Sarah Maza, “The Rose-Girl of Salency: Representations of Virtue in Prerevolutionary France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 22, no. 3 (1989): 395–412.