Tea at Trianon: The Palais-Royal Court and the Outbreak of the French Revolution

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

Wednesday, April 1, 2026

The Palais-Royal Court and the Outbreak of the French Revolution

From Open Edition:

In London in February 1793, Isaac Cruikshank (1756–1811) published an engraving entitled The Martyr of Equality, Behold the Progress of Our System. It shows Louis-Philippe-Joseph, duc d’Orléans (1747–93), formerly first prince of the blood, holding the severed head of the former king Louis XVI. This polemical engraving suggests that this prince from the Bourbon dynasty, then known as Philippe Égalité, was responsible for the death of his cousin Louis. Indeed, as is well known, the duc d’Orléans voted, in January 1793, for the death of ‘Citoyen Louis Capet’, as the deposed king was called, and this decision deeply shocked many contemporaries. Those who considered the condemnation of the former king to be a crime saw in the voting behaviour of his cousin a criminal betrayal of the dynasty, the monarchy and the fatherland.
This caricature was just one of many polemical attacks on Philippe Égalité, who was accused of being heavily responsible for the revolutionary upheavals and violence. The strong resentment towards the duc d’Orléans also left deep traces in historiography, especially in popular narratives. After he voted for the death of his cousin Louis XVI, Louis-Philippe-Joseph d’Orléans was accused of having been the puppet master of the revolutionaries. In 1796, the journalist Galart de Montjoie (1746–1816) published his Histoire de la conjuration de Louis-Philippe-Joseph d’Orléans, in which he accused him, among other things, of having hired assassins and fomented the Revolution to seize power.1 In the twentieth century, right-wing authors referred to the duc d’Orléans as the ‘“Grand Maître” de la Révolution’, an allusion to his position as grand master of French Freemasonry. Following Montjoie, they accused the duc d’Orléans of having instigated a putsch against the King.2 Such a scenario was indeed conceivable in the eighteenth century, as the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 had been precisely such an intra-dynastic coup d’état. It certainly gained further plausibility through the experience of the July Revolution of 1830, which resulted in the son of Louis-Philippe-Joseph actually ascending the throne. (Read more.)