Tea at Trianon: Massacre of the Swiss Guards

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there 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 had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall 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 which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, August 11, 2008

Massacre of the Swiss Guards

August 10, 1792 saw the fall of the French monarchy. The Brunswick Manifesto, published earlier that month, issued a warning to the citizens of Paris that if the royal family were injured, the city would be invaded. The Manifesto only added to the unrest of the city, already agitated by Jacobin propaganda and the war against Austria. Hearing that the Tuileries palace was about to be attacked, Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette and their family escaped across the gardens to the National Assembly, where they took refuge in the stenographer's box. Louis sent an order for the Swiss Guards to lay down their arms and retreat in order to save their lives. As British historian Nesta Webster says in her book Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette during the Revolution: "Could [Louis XVI] imagine...that the mob, not content with venting their fury on the Chateau, would massacre not only the Swiss Guard, men of the people who had remained at their posts, but even the luckless servants in the kitchens of the Palace? The horrors committed on this 10th of August were such as no human mind could possibly have conceived."

900 Swiss guards were brutally killed, many tortured, some roasted, mutilated, decapitated, with their limbs distributed throughout Paris. Children played ball in the streets with the heads of the brave Swiss, and the steps of the Tuileries ran with blood, like some gruesome altar of human sacrifice. People dipped bread into the blood of the victims. The massacre was only the beginning of the mass murder which already characterized the French Revolution; in September 1792, 2000 more people would be horribly killed, including priests, religious, small children, and the Queen's friend Princess de Lamballe. The statue of the Lion of Lucerne commemorates the fallen Swiss. Share