Tea at Trianon: Le Radeau de la Méduse

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

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Le Radeau de la Méduse

Gareth Russell on the allurements of propaganda. To quote:

Théodore Géricault chose to unveil his masterpiece in the Paris Salon of 1819 not because he was especially moved by the story of human frailty, but because he wanted to indict Louis XVIII's government for what he saw as its corruption and deceitfulness. The painting isn't really about the men lying in various extremities across a sea-tossed raft; it's about the government that put them there. The figure looming largest in Géricault's fevered imagination are not the sailors who cut the ropes binding the raft to the other lifeboats or the men who tossed their weaker colleagues into the swell. It's not even really about de Chaumareys. What Le Radeau de la Méduse is about is the restored monarchy. It's about Louis XVIII and the culpability of corruption which allegedly flowed inexorably from his ci-devant hands. And that's basically what the French Revolution is. The first time you look at it, like Le Radeau de la Méduse, it seems to be about people. It seems to be about human suffering and outrage that such conditions should exist. But look at it closer and you'll see that what it's actually about are ideas, cleverly masked behind the misery of the people it claims to be representing.