Tea at Trianon: 200 Years of 'Le Figaro'

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, January 20, 2026

200 Years of 'Le Figaro'

From The European Conservative:

In its early days, Le Figaro was classically liberal; royalist without being ultra. It was annoyed by the pettiness of Charles X as much as by the mediocrity of Louis-Philippe, the monarch of the barricades. After various editorial vicissitudes, it was vigorously taken over in 1854 by a certain Hippolyte de Villemessant. People spoke of a second birth for the newspaper. At the time, Le Figaro stood out above all as a literary and artistic newspaper. Its reviews were read and appreciated, setting the standard in the small Parisian world of arts and letters—which, at that time, meant the whole of Europe. Music was not excluded from its field of expertise. Villemessant was a close friend of Offenbach, whose work he fervently supported. In Paris in 1867, Le Figaro helped to promote the phenomenon that was Johann Strauss, thus paving the way for the international triumph of The Blue Danube. In a unique gesture in the history of the press, Strauss composed a Figaro Polka, a piece dedicated to the newspaper, as a token of his gratitude.

In the same year, Le Figaro became a political outlet, thanks to the liberalisation of Napoleon III’s empire. At the time of the Commune, the newspaper watched with horror as revolutionary madness raged in Paris. Under the Third Republic, it triumphed with the restoration of order. Its social conservatism and attachment to freedoms made it a model of balance in this troubled period when a leaderless France still did not know where its destiny lay. When Captain Dreyfus was unjustly convicted in a climate of antisemitism fuelled by rivalry with Germany, Le Figaro chose the side of justice. Émile Zola published several articles in Le Figaro defending the innocent officer before his indictment, “J’accuse,” published in a rival newspaper, L’Aurore, truly launched the ‘Dreyfus Affair.’

The newspaper weathered the First World War and the crisis of the 1930s by continuing to publish the most prestigious writers of the time, including Marcel Proust and Jean Giraudoux among its columnists.

When the international situation became tense, Le Figaro chose the side of the Francoists against the Republicans in Spain. At the time of Munich, like many other French people, its journalists were ‘unenthusiastic Munichites’ while Nazism aroused increasing mistrust and revulsion.

The Second World War marked a turning point in the history of the French press. The vast majority of French newspapers, which had continued to be published under the Occupation and the Vichy regime, disappeared or were bought out and renamed. Le Figaro, which first withdrew to the free zone before suspending publication in 1942, was an exception. A Gaullist publication, it rose from the ashes with the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944, benefiting from its literary aura and the support of writers ranging from Louis Aragon to François Mauriac. The flow of publication, which had been interrupted for a time, resumed. (Read more.)