Tea at Trianon: The August Decrees

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

Friday, July 1, 2022

The August Decrees

From World History Encyclopedia:

The National Assembly had been preoccupied with debating the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and its relation to the forthcoming constitution, when it was forced to change course to deal with the insurrections. The Assembly's first reaction was one of embarrassment, seeing as the uprisings had occurred despite the efforts of their newly created bourgeois citizen militias. On the night of 3 August, it was announced that "letters from all the provinces make it appear that properties of all kinds have fallen prey to the most criminal looting. Everywhere, chateaux are burned, convents destroyed, farms abandoned to pillage" (Furet, 108). While the Assembly acknowledged it had to act, suppression of the uprisings by use of arms was ruled out, as doing so would return legitimacy and authority to royal soldiers (despite some of the uprisings having already been put down by soldiers). Instead, a bill was drawn up, to be discussed the following night, that would reaffirm the "sacred value" of all forms of property and dues, while also developing a program of poor relief.

These were not the actions of an Assembly that intended to abolish feudalism. Indeed, many of the deputies may have seen little reason to do so; outside of pockets of territory such as Burgundy or Franche-Comté where feudalism still thrived, the seigneurial regime had long been in decline. Although France was still largely agricultural, a modernizing Europe allowed the nobility quicker paths to wealth than manorialism. Now having to compete with the rising bourgeois class for influence and power, some nobles began to turn towards investments in industry or land development. Still, traces of feudalism such as the corvée, a practice of unpaid and forced labor, were prevalent in regions where traditional manorialism was dying out. (Read more.)