Affair of the Diamond Necklace
The Queen's reputation, already tarnished by gossip, was further sullied by the false accusation that she had participated in a crime to defraud the Crown's jewellers in acquiring a very expensive diamond necklace she then refused to pay for.
In 1772, Louis XV of France decided to make Madame du Barry, one of his mistresses, a special gift at the estimated cost of 2,000,000 livres (approximately US$17.5 million in 2024).
He requested that Parisian jewelers Charles Auguste Boehmer and Paul Bassenge create a diamond necklace that would surpass all others in grandeur.
[1] The jewellers hoped it would be a product that the new Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, would buy and indeed in 1778 the new king, Louis XVI, offered it to his wife as a present, but she refused.
[3] Jeanne de la Motte took advantage of the Cardinal's belief in her by borrowing large sums of money from him, telling him that they were for the Queen's charity work.
The diamond necklace "was promptly picked apart, and the gems sold on the black markets of Paris and London" by Madame de la Motte.
The controversy of the event stems from the arrest of the Cardinal in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and the trial that declared him innocent and Jeanne de la Motte Valois and her accomplices guilty.
[7] The police arrested the prostitute Nicole Le Guay as well as Rétaux de Villette, who confessed that he had written the letters given to Rohan in the queen's name and had imitated her signature.
[9] Jeanne de La Motte was condemned to whipping, branding with a V (for voleuse, 'thief') on each shoulder, and sent to life imprisonment in the prostitutes' prison at the Salpêtrière.
The trial found Marie Antoinette blameless in the matter, Rohan an innocent dupe, and that de La Mottes deceived both for their own ends.
[clarification needed][3] Despite findings to the contrary, many people in France persisted in the belief that the Queen used the La Mottes as an instrument to satisfy her hatred of the Cardinal de Rohan.
Various circumstances fortified that belief: the Queen's disappointment at Rohan's acquittal and the fact that he was afterwards deprived by the King of his charges and exiled to the Abbey of La Chaise-Dieu.
All of those factors led to a huge decline in the Queen's popularity and impressed an image of her to the public as a manipulative spendthrift who was more interested in vanity than in the welfare of her people.
Her early history of excessive spending had already blemished her popularity, but the Diamond Necklace Affair catapulted public opinion of her into near-hatred, since she appeared to have plotted to misuse more of the kingdom's depleting money for personal trinkets.
The Diamond Necklace Affair heightened the French general public's hatred and disdain for Marie Antoinette since it was "designed to leave the queen in a state of scandal, with the impossibility of claiming any truth for herself".
[13] The public relations nightmare led to an increase in salacious and degrading pamphlets, which would serve as kindling for the oncoming French Revolution.
It could be said that "she symbolized, among other things, the lavishness and corruption of a dying regime" and served as "the perfect scapegoat of the morality play that the revolution in part became", which made her a target for the hatred of the French Republic and groups like the Jacobins and the sans-culottes.
