Tea at Trianon: From Tontine to the Guillotine

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

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

From Tontine to the Guillotine

From The Irish Times:

A feature of the Irish tontines was the large-scale involvement of investors from Geneva, who were learning how to “game” the system. In 1777, they tied their combined £50,000 investment to the life expectancies of 50 young girls, aged three to seven, from families known for longevity. The plan worked well. Forty years later, 64 per cent of the nominees were still alive, compared with 42 per cent of their age cohort in the rest of the tontine.

Smaller investors in 1777 included the founder of the Presentation Sisters, Nano Nagle, whose £100 share nominated the life of a younger nun, to whom she later bequeathed it. Another £100, from persons unknown (at least to me), was tied to the fate of Marie Antoinette. Aged 21 in 1777 (although it says 20 on the tontine list), she must have seemed a safe bet.

In Reflections on the Revolution in France, a saddened Burke recalled his enchantment at having seen the future queen at Versailles in the mid-1770s. Her country was then “a nation of gallant men,” he said, in which he thought “ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult”. Alas, he now knew, “the age of chivalry is dead”.

In fact it wasn’t quite dead in Burke’s native Ireland, where in 1792 a plot was hatched to free the queen from prison and get her out of France on a wine-merchant’s ship. (Read more.)