Tea at Trianon: The Radical Political Writings of Sophie de Grouchy

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, February 16, 2024

The Radical Political Writings of Sophie de Grouchy

It never ceases to amuse me how people who hated monarchy paved the way for truly totalitarian systems of government. From Aeon:

From the beginning it was clear that Grouchy did not lag behind her husband in terms of radical political thought. Reflecting on her role in the revolution, a former friend, André Morellet, wrote that Grouchy was to blame for her husband’s more extreme views. Her Letters on Sympathy certainly display an uncompromising republican framework. But for fuller evidence of her more radical views, we need to turn to the newspaper she founded together with Condorcet, Paine and others: Le Républicain. Published in 1791, the journal included anonymous articles by Grouchy and her translations of some of Paine’s work. She became known as a ‘fierce’ republican, and, not surprisingly, as an anti-monarchist she was mocked and caricatured in royalist journals.

In one of these articles, Grouchy attacked monarchy as an economic extravagance, and at the same time showed that it served no purpose beyond a ceremonial one by proposing that the king and his entourage be replaced by automata. Given the cost of the real ‘moving sculptures’ and the difficulty of producing and maintaining them in good working order, the claim that automata would represent a significant cost-saving was a direct attack on royal extravagance. But more than an economic cost, it was the psychological cost of monarchy that Grouchy was most worried about. In the second article (which she may have redrafted from an earlier one by her friend Dumont), Grouchy took on a theme she developed in her Letters on Sympathy: the moral and psychological cost of domination, the kind of domination characteristic of monarchy. (Read more.)