Tea at Trianon: The Statue of Louis XV

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, June 23, 2020

The Statue of Louis XV

Tearing down statues is a revolutionary pastime. From The Iris:

Edme Bouchardon’s last masterpiece, a thirty-nine-feet tall Equestrian Monument to Louis XV, once stood in the middle of Place Louis XV—present-day Place de la Concorde—in Paris. Despite taking several years to create, an epic process that I detailed in a recent post, the bronze sculpture remained in place for less than three decades. Following the insurrection of August 10, 1792, Parisians toppled this emblem of royal power. Now, all that remains of the monument is the king’s right hand holding the upper part of the baton of command, which is currently on display in the final gallery of the Getty Museum exhibition Bouchardon: Royal Artist of the Enlightenment. How did this fragment survive the destruction of royal images and symbols during the French Revolution?

An anonymous drawing owned by the Louvre shows the crowd that gathered on Place Louis XV to witness the removal of the bronze statue. One man stands on top of the empty pedestal, still holding a stick he may have used as a lever, while two others are busy below trying to remove the relief that decorated the base. In the foreground, the horse and the king are upside down; the arms of the former and the head of the latter broke off when the sculpture fell and hit the ground. (Read more.)