Tea at Trianon: The "Trial" of the Princesse de Lamballe

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, September 2, 2013

The "Trial" of the Princesse de Lamballe

From Vive la Reine:

One of her murderers, brought long years after to some tardy justice, described her as ‘a little lady dressed in white.’ -The Princesse de Lamballe by B.C. Hardy

photo: The Princesse de Lamballe refusing to swear an oath against the king and queen.

lara77 said...: I wonder if French history books dwell on THAT chapter of republican justice??; September 3, 2013 at 8:45:00 AM EDT
Jack B. said...: Much of the republican atrocities are kept out of the history books. Witness the uproar when Reynald Secher wrote of the Vendee Uprising and the Revolution's response to it as a "genocide". The French Establishment would not hear of it (heck the Vendee uprising itself is not in most French textbooks).

The Princess Lamballe was by all accounts a thoroughly honest, pious, decent person who never harmed another soul and who remained loyal to her friend and monarch knowing it would mean her death. A death that is one of the most horrific not only of the Revolution but of any time. Yet movies and novels depict her largely as nothing more than Marie Antoinette's dim sycophant.; September 3, 2013 at 7:17:00 PM EDT