Tea at Trianon: What You Might Not Know about Marie-Antoinette

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, December 4, 2017

What You Might Not Know about Marie-Antoinette

I recently came upon two articles that purport to inform the world about what it does not know about Marie-Antoinette. The History.com article is fairly accurate, except the nonsense about Louis having a "painful medical condition" for which there is no medical evidence. As for the part about the "fairy-tale village", the Queen merely rebuilt the village at Trianon that had once been there, giving the cottages to local peasants, with one for herself. To quote:

When told that starving French peasants lacked any bread to eat, the queen is alleged to have callously declared, “Let them eat cake!” There is no evidence, however, that Marie Antoinette ever uttered that famous quip. The phrase used to encapsulate the out-of-touch and indifferent royals first appeared years before Marie Antoinette ever arrived in France in philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s description of Marie-Therese, the Spanish princess who married King Louis XIV in 1660. The remark was also ascribed to two aunts of Louis XVI before it was apocryphally tied to Marie Antoinette. (Read more.)

The National Geographic article is good except for the part about the Queen using flour on her wigs. Marie-Antoinette was almost always "in her own hair," that is wigless, sometimes with light powder. And this absurd statement: "To be clear, Marine Antoinette was no saint. She believed that the French Bourbon monarchy had been ordained by God, and so she didn’t accept the idea that royals like her were equal to their subjects." So we are to understand that Marie-Antoinette was "no saint" simply because she believed in the only system of government she had ever known? Does being part of a monarchy automatically disqualify someone from sainthood? Does the writer not know that the Church has canonized emperors and empresses, kings and queens?

But the rest of the article is not bad. To quote:

Versailles, for all its decadence, was a very dirty place, filled with animals and excrement. Instead of cleaning their shoes, the royals and aristocrats would throw them out every few days. This culture of waste and excess was something Marie Antoinette stepped into when she arrived in France. She didn’t create it, and she didn’t take it to the extremes that others did. At least four members of the royal family spent more on clothing than she did—including Louis XVI’s brother the comte d'Artois, who ordered 365 pairs of shoes per year. Though she certainly went through more shoes than the average French person, Marie Antoinette “wasn’t known to have been a particular shoe freak” at Versailles, says Weber. (Read more.)