Like her brother, she had all the domestic virtues, and, as was to be expected of a sister of Louis XVI., she was in favour of absolutist principles.
Innocent's letters, however, not only reveal that superior wisdom which can take into account practical needs and relax severity of principle at the right moment, as well as that spirit of tolerance and equity which is opposed to the excess of zeal and intellectual narrowness of subordinates, but they also prove that, in the internal government of the Church, he was bent on gathering into his hands all the motive threads, and that he stretched the absolutist tradition to its furthest limits, intervening in the most trifling acts in the lives of the clergy, and regarding it as an obligation of his office to act and think for all.
Her instincts, like those of her enemy Frederick and her son Joseph II., were emphatically absolutist.
Though the direct results of these unions were the restoration of prestige to the absolutist papacy and the bringing of Byzantine men of letters, like Bessarion, to the West, the outcome was on the whole disappointing.
Subsequently, when the Protestant hierarchy was forcibly established in Sweden, matters were much complicated by the absolutist tendencies of Gustavus.