Tea at Trianon: The Forgotten Prince of Versailles, Part I

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

Sunday, August 16, 2026

The Forgotten Prince of Versailles, Part I

From Philip Diaz-Lewis at Rationis Fines:

In December 1765 the heir to the French throne died at Fontainebleau, aged thirty-six. Louis-Ferdinand, Dauphin of France, had been trained from childhood for kingship and had spent fifteen years attending the councils of his father Louis XV. He would never reign. Three of his sons eventually did. The (in)famous career of his son, Louis-August, the future Louis XVI, would overshadow the memory of his father.
The funeral preaching at once made him into the exemplary figure of an ideal Christian prince. First the Jesuits, then the bishop Loménie de Brienne, then the abbé de Boismont, lined up to preach orations. In their eyes Louis-Ferdinand was a model of rational religion (religion eclairée), and piety (pieté).1 His former confessor, the abbé Soldini, then composed in 1766 the work Essai sur la vie de Mgr Louis Dauphin. He set Louis-Ferdinand against the sensualism and materialism that had come to characterise the radical French Enlightenment of the philosophes.2
Scarcely had his body been laid to rest, however, that his legacy would be contested. For the poet and literary critic Antoine-Léonard Thomas had written a great elegy in his praise, likening the prince to ancient Roman heroes and sages like the general Germanicus, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Catholic admirers complained that he was turning the late Dauphin into a virtuous pagan instead of a Christian.3 (Read more.)