Tea at Trianon: The Revolution and the Classics

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

Saturday, May 4, 2024

The Revolution and the Classics

From Apollo:

The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) by Jacques-Louis David has always been a divisive picture. In 1824 it seemed ‘worthy’ but ‘boring’ to Stendhal, who found its figures ‘without passion’ and noted that ‘in any country it is absurd to march off to battle with no clothes on’. Painted on a huge scale, it represents combatants and victims of all ages and different classes, a total picture of ancient society that echoed the French Revolutionary festivals. David, pageant master of those festivals, bisected this frieze of martial, male nudity – depicting the confrontation between the warriors Tatius and Romulus in the foreground – with the onrush of women led by Hersilia, daughter of the former and wife to the latter, who with a single, determined gesture seeks to end the fighting. A courageous and athletic figure, Hersilia mediates between the claims of kinship and the state and, for Norman Bryson, escapes from all the conventional signifiers of the patriarchal order. She is the prototype for other gender-defying heroism in French art in the 1830s, from Francois Rudé’s Genius of Liberty on the Arc de Triomphe to Ingres’s Saint Symphorien and Delacroix’s Marianne on the barricades. (Read more.)