"Marie-Antoinette, like Louis XV's mistresses, was the victim of master blackmailers working from London who wrote untrue things in order to get money out of them," Simon Burrows of Leeds University said.
The blackmailers were not motivated by political concerns, Mr Burrows said, they were simply criminals, or perhaps "reformist patriots" at the most.
Mr Burrows’ new book explains how about 15 blackmailers made their living by producing pamphlets which never reached the public, having been intercepted by the king's agents when they got across the channel.
But some copies of the pamphlets were hidden in the Bastille fortress and discovered when the building was stormed on July 14, 1789.
"That's when the rumours started to circulate among the people. They say Marie-Antoinette's dissolute lifestyle sparked the revolution but these stories, made-up stories at that, were only discovered afterwards," Mr Burrows said.
Marie-Antoinette was guillotined in 1793.