Tea at Trianon: Royalty and the Press

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

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Royalty and the Press

Some reflections from author and historian Gareth Russell.

When she was first confronted with evidence of the libelles, the precursors to both pornography magazines and the lower-end tabloids, Marie-Antoinette simply refused to take them seriously. As far as she was concerned, they were nothing but trash written by trash; she failed to realise, until it was too late, the awful damage that these lies had done. That sublime royal self-confidence, and the refusal to acknowledge tawdry and seedy reality, has flowed inexorably from the mirrored halls of Versailles right the way down to the current incumbents of Buckingham Palace. To acknowledge something gives it credibility; therefore the best thing to do is to ignore it. The problem is, though, that it won't go away just because you want it to and, as Marie-Antoinette learned in 1789, when mud is flung, it usually leaves a stain - however undeserved. Whilst you can certainly over-egg the comparisons between Marie-Antoinette and Princess Diana, it's hard not to conclude that one thing they had in common was that they were both harried to their premature deaths by bad publicity. (Read entire post.)