Tea at Trianon: The French Revolutionary Myth

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, August 19, 2021

The French Revolutionary Myth

Genocidal atrocity. From Reaction:

Europe had experienced mass atrocities before, notably during the Thirty Years War, but the French Revolution was something novel. In response to the royalist and Catholic uprising in the Vendée, on 1 August 1793, the Convention decreed the systematic destruction of the province, the razing of farms and dwellings, the extermination of the inhabitants and all domestic animals, the burning of crops and forests. This was the first systematic attempt by a government to exterminate its own people. It was the first genocide.

“Not one is to be left alive…” “Women are reproductive furrows who must be ploughed under…” “Fire, blood, death are needed to preserve liberty…” Such was the discourse of the Convention. Estimates of the numbers killed in the Vendean genocide range from 117,000 to 400,000. Babies were killed in front of their mothers who were then murdered, girls were raped and drowned, children were baked in ovens. The man whose Twelve Infernal Columns executed these atrocities, General Louis-Marie Turreau, is commemorated on the Arc de Triomphe, along with other scoundrels.

A tannery for human skin (prefiguring Nazi industry) was established at Angers. There was already one operating at Étampes and another at Meudon; among its customers was Louis de Saint-Just, Robespierre’s chief lieutenant, who wrote: “The skin that comes from men is of a consistency and richness superior to that of the chamois. That of the female subjects is more supple, but provides less solidity.” Saint-Just wore breeches made of human skin, as did Philippe Égalité, the renegade Duc d’Orléans, cousin of Louis XVI, and other deputies at the Festival of the Supreme Being.

When the historian Reynald Secher revealed the truth about the Republic’s genocide, it cost him his academic career. French historiography is the exclusive province of admirers of Robespierre; they are as fanatical in defending the Republic’s foundation myth as any Terrorist in 1793. That is the root of the problem. France has a constitutional order built upon a lie, that the French Revolution was “a good thing”. The effect on its culture is necessarily toxic.

All the kitsch cult of “Marianne”, the cockerel emblem replacing the fleur-de-lis, the stark, geometric tricolour unconsciously expressing the vacuity of the republican myth and its role as a barrier to embracing the rich pre-1789 heritage of France – all that amounts to a cultural straitjacket. One could not ask for a better illustration of the banality of the post-Revolution concept of France than to listen to Emmanuel Macron expounding the republican dogma of “laïcité” – a euphemism for anticlericalism.

Since the Revolution there have been two embodiments of France: one the legacy of the deluded ideologues of the National Convention, based on Liberty, Equality and Fraternity; the other the patrimony of St Louis, Catholic and living its traditions to a different pulse. Pope Leo XIII foolishly tried to bridge that gulf by promoting the Ralliement and the Church was rewarded for his pains by the ousting of religious orders from education and, in 1905, by the Republic’s confiscation of all cathedrals and churches.

The scandal known as “l’affaire des fiches” exposed how the government, assisted by the Masonic lodges, prevented the promotion of Catholic army officers. In 1914 the same elements ensured that units from the most Catholic regions of France were the first to be herded towards the German machine-guns. That fissure remains today. Republican ideologues have done France no favour by shackling its identity to one of the most evil episodes in European history: it is as if Germany perversely looked back to National Socialism – of which French Jacobinism was the ideological inspiration –as its foundation myth. The false cult of the Revolution means that modern France is built upon a sewer.

This malign legacy has resonances far beyond France. The French Revolution is also mythologised in Britain. The mythological narrative of Ancien Régime tyranny, revolutionary virtue and reform creating liberty needs to be expunged from a public imagination whose impression of the Revolution is largely derived from Charles Dickens’ portrayal of homicidal nobles driving over children in Parisian streets.

Above all, the fiction of Bourbon “absolutism” must be discredited. Louis XVI summoned the Estates General because he needed to raise taxes. Had he enjoyed absolute power, he would not have needed to call a parliament. So far from being absolute, if the King of France created someone a duke – the ennobling prerogative being the most fundamental right of royalty – the dukedom would remain invalid, except as a courtesy title at court, if the local parlement arbitrarily refused to register it. (Read more.)