709. The Terror: The Execution of Marie Antoinette (Part 3)
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How did Edmund Burke’s lament reflect early revolutionary sentiment about Marie Antoinette?
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphinesse, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendour and joy. Oh What a revolution! And what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that form. Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom. Little did I dream.
That I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry has gone, that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished. Forever. So that's one of the most celebrated pieces of prose ever written about the French Revolution. It was written by the Anglo Irish politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, often seen as one of the godfathers of conservatism. Burke wrote those words in seventeen ninety. So very early on in the revolution, he was prompted by the tumultuous events really of seventeen eighty nine, the march on Versailles by a mob of market women.
Of revolutionary militants, the attack by night on the apartments of the Queen of France, which had sent her running barefoot to the bedchamber of her husband to seek sanctuary, and the removal of the royal family to Paris, never to return to Versailles. Tom, to Edmund Burke, as to so many like-minded people across Europe, this was practically sacrilegious, wasn't it?
Yeah. The French monarchy was the most splendid, the most magnificent in the whole of Europe. It provided a role model for every other royal family. And it stood at the apogee of an entire society that was founded on kind of loyalty and manners and notions of honor, which ultimately reached back a millennium and more to the very beginnings of the French monarchy. Amid the collapse of Roman Gaul. Its roots are that deep. And now to Burke and to people who read Burke and admired his sentiments, it seemed that everything that was most glorious about that monarchy and about those traditions were being reduced to kind of arid politicking about rights and money, which is essentially the issues that were current in 1789 and 1790.
But of course, for the monarchy, And specifically for the king and queen of France, it gets a lot worse after 1790. I think for admirers of everything that royalism could be, the Queen of France, the heroine of that passage, that very florid passage that you read, stood as a much more potent symbol of the French monarchy than the Queen's dull and plodding husband, Louis XVI, because the Queen was. Of course, Marie Antoinette, a figure who was famous across Europe for her glamour. She's a woman who was perpetually setting new trends with her clothes, her hairstyles, her whole way of life. She was, on one hand, bred into the height of luxury. She wasn't just the wife of the King of France, but the sister of the Emperor of Austria.
But she was also a woman who. Had found herself stifled by the formalities of court life at Versailles. She had worn the most expensive jewels in Europe, and in fact, diamonds got her into quite a lot of trouble over the course of her time on the throne. But also, famously, in the Petit Trianon, her hideaway in the grounds of Versailles, she played at being a shepherdess. This was a woman who was incredibly mobile. In her tastes, in her sense of fashion. She's always at the cutting edge of what is modish. And I think that she is viewed by historians of fashion as not just a representative figure of the ancient regime, the regime that gets toppled in the French Revolution, but of ideals of fashion that will emerge in the 19th century and which are still very current in France today.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did Edmund Burke’s lament reflect early revolutionary sentiment about Marie Antoinette?
0:10–11:03
2
Why did revolutionary propaganda portray Marie Antoinette as a monstrous, misogynistic figure?
11:03–20:27
3
What were Marie Antoinette’s conditions after being moved to the Temple following Louis XVI’s death?
20:27–28:31
4
How did the Conciergerie imprison Marie Antoinette and what were her daily hardships?
28:31–36:55
5
What role did Bertrand Barère and the Committee of Public Safety play in erasing royal symbols?
36:55–46:38
6
How was the Basilica of Saint‑Denis demolished to obliterate the monarchy’s legacy?
46:38–53:57
7
What charges led to Marie Antoinette’s trial and execution on 16 October 1793?
53:57–1:02:33
8
What became of Louis Charles and the remaining royal family after Marie Antoinette’s death?
1:02:33–1:09:58
Speakers
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