Tea at Trianon: Leo XIV and the Place de la Concorde

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, October 16, 2026

Leo XIV and the Place de la Concorde

From CR:

The culminating moment of the papal journey was the Mass celebrated at the Place de la Concorde, in the heart of Paris, on the afternoon of September 26th, before an immense crowd estimated at 800,000 people. An event of profound symbolic character, given what this square once represented.

The Place de la Concorde, designed in 1755 by the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel, was originally known as the Place Louis XV. The French Revolution changed the history of this site forever. The great square became the principal theater of Jacobin capital executions, and in 1792 it was renamed the Place de la Révolution. The guillotine transformed capital punishment into a public spectacle before which the Republic demonstrated its power to suppress all “enemies of the people.” On January 21, 1793, King Louis XVI was beheaded there; on October 16 of the same year, Queen Marie Antoinette followed. The crime of Louis XVI was that of being a king. What was condemned to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal was not the man but the monarchical institution he represented. The square conceived to celebrate the oldest Catholic monarchy in Europe thus became the site of its symbolic annihilation. “The mere title of king,” Robespierre proclaimed, “draws down the scourges of war upon the troubled nation.” But Robespierre himself, following Danton, was guillotined at the Place de la Concorde in 1794: the Revolution devoured its children without mercy.

Pope Pius VI, in the allocution Quare lacrymae delivered in Consistory on June 17, 1793, attributed to Louis XVI “the glory of martyrdom.” He declared: “Who could ever doubt that this king was put to death out of hatred for the Faith and in contempt of the dogmas of Catholicism?” At the origin of the trial and condemnation of the French sovereign, Pius VI explained, lay the “impious ideologies” of “perverse philosophers” — the leading figures of the Enlightenment. From the very beginning of his pontificate, with the bull Inscrutabile Divinae of December 25, 1775, the Pontiff, addressing the Christian people and their pastors, had expressed his anguish at seeing that “restless and furious men, as though driven by an irresistible passion for novelty, do not hesitate to attack the very foundations of rational nature and endeavor — if they could — to subvert them entirely.” The principal revolutionary instrument was the flood of books inspired by Enlightenment ideas that had inundated France since the reign of Louis XV. For this reason, Pius VI exhorted the French bishops: “Remove the evil from among you — that is, with great energy and solicitude, strive to eliminate from your flock all these poisoned books.”

The Enlightenment constitutes a decisive phase of that ideological process which, from the humanist and Protestant Revolution, has led in less than five centuries to the Communist Revolution. Lenin wrote: “We shall probably have to follow… the advice that Engels once gave to the German socialists: to translate and disseminate among the masses the French Enlightenment and atheist publications of the eighteenth century.” But if it is true that the Revolution must continually renew its errors, an authentic Catholic reaction cannot cease to combat those errors, which have spread throughout the world and have unfortunately penetrated even within the Church. Leo XIV himself appeared to overlook the historical significance of the Enlightenment, describing it in his address at the Élysée Palace on September 25 as “a stage that brought to the world important achievements in the domain of human rights.” And yet, the following day, before his meeting with the synodal assembly, the Pope paused in prayer in the garden adjacent to the Institut Catholique, before the plaque bearing the inscription Hic ceciderunt — “Here they fell” — marking the spot where, in September 1792, approximately 115 priests and bishops suffered martyrdom for refusing to renounce their fidelity to the See of Peter. The murderers of these witnesses of the faith — later beatified by the Church — were steeped in precisely that Enlightenment ideology which aimed to eradicate the Christian roots of society. The Festival of the Goddess Reason celebrated in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame on November 10, 1793, marked the apogee of the dechristianization sought by the “Philosophy of the Enlightenment.” It was for this reason that Pius XI, in his address of October 17, 1926, on the occasion of the beatification of the martyrs of the September massacres, recalled “the upheaval of the public order which, at the end of the eighteenth century, had its origin in France and swept away all things, sacred and profane, raging not only against the king and the nobility, but above all against the Church and her ministers. Most wicked men, who had unlawfully seized power, masking under the appearance of philosophy the hatred that animated them against the Church, strove with all their might to blot out the very name of Christian.” (Read more.)