Who Censored Marie Antoinette's Letters? X-Rays Reveal a Surprise

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: In late 1791 and early 1792, on the eve of the French Revolutionary Wars, Queen Marie Antoinette engaged in a secret correspondence with her confidant and rumored lover, Swedish Count Axel von Fersen. Nearly 50 letters from that exchange survive at the French National Archives. But certain passages in 15 of the letters were unreadable, obscured by redactions made with swirls of dark ink. Now, researchers have revealed the words beneath 45 of these alterations using x-ray technology. They have also discovered the censor's identity: von Fersen, himself. The idea that von Fersen made the redactions is "a revelation," says Catriona Seth, a professor of French literature at the University of Oxford who was not involved with the work. Historians had thought the letters were censored in the second half of the 19th century -- most likely by von Fersen's great-nephew -- to protect the writers' reputations. Now, she says, scholars will need to rethink the cover-up -- and the reasons behind it. The newly legible passages are largely sentimental, phrases like "made my heart happy," and "you that I love." Comments on politics and world events, meanwhile, remain uncensored. But even these seemingly intimate phrases don't definitively tell historians anything new about Marie Antoinette and von Fersen's relationship, Seth says. Scholars, she notes, already knew Marie Antoinette had "a very deep affection for him." Still, she adds, the letters offer "direct insight into the thoughts and feelings of Marie Antoinette." In the future, the techniques in this study could be used in combination with machine algorithms to automatically transcribe old texts, the researchers say, making it easier to understand these important documents -- and others like them. The researchers published their findings in the journal Science Advances.

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