Remembering the Past in Restoration France: An Expiatory Chapel for Marie-Antoinette

The recreated prison cell of the Queen

The actual prison cell of the Queen

 From Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide:

After its restoration, the Conciergerie in Paris w­­­­­as reopened to the public in 1989, the year of the "Bicentenaire" celebrating the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution.[1] The new historical museum of the Conciergerie, formerly the most famous prison in France, offers visitors an almost authentic look at the conditions of living—or rather dying—during the revolutionary Terreur, the period of violence and mass executions that started in September 1793 and ended in July 1794 with the "Thermidorian Reaction." Visiting the Conciergerie today, one enters the gloomy atmosphere of 18th-century crime, grim with punishment and death, reminiscent of Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors. Visitors are faced with life-sized figures of incarcerated men in small dark cells recalling some well-known and, in addition, thousands of nameless victims of the Terror. The representation of one of the most famous inmates of the Conciergerie is especially striking. Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, spent the final two months of her life in this prison, before her execution on October 16th, 1793. Her figure, which can only be seen from behind, is shown sitting in a cell at a small wooden desk, guarded by a member of the National Guard (fig. 1). Contrary to its appearance, this scene is not set in the cell in which the queen was actually imprisoned, but is only meant to be an accurate reconstruction.[2] The cell in which Marie-Antoinette was imprisoned still exists, but not as a cell. In 1816, during the French Restoration era, it was transformed into a chapelle expiatoire—expiatory chapel (fig. 2). Unchanged during the Conciergerie's restoration before its reopening in 1989, it can still be visited within the prison complex. This small chapel that the newly restored Bourbon monarchy built in honor of Marie-Antoinette confronts the visitor with a staging of history that differs considerably from that of the reconstructed cell. Marie-Antoinette's chapelle expiatoire is in fact a true chapel. It consists of a very small room painted entirely in dark blue, a colored glass window reminding one of ordinary church windows, a cenotaph on one side of the room, and an altar on the other. Here we see the queen again, this time not "in person," but appearing on three paintings representing memorable events of her last days.

In the Conciergerie, the fate of Marie-Antoinette is therefore recalled in two very different ways. On the one hand, we are confronted with a setting that seems to be authentic when in fact it is not; on the other hand, the original queen's cell has been so radically changed that it no longer appears as an authentic historical site. The commemoration of the queen within the prison complex of the Conciergerie is hence somewhat contradictory: the lines between authenticity and historical falsity, between fact and fiction are not as clear as they seem to be at first glance. This deliberate delusion especially draws one's attention to the queen's expiatory chapel of 1816, which is the main subject of this article. This slightly kitsch memorial raises questions that not only concern the construction, political context, and iconography of the chapel, but also consider the notion of authenticity and the ways in which history has been staged and commemorated throughout the ages. Therefore, the focus of my article is twofold: first, I will put the queen's expiatory chapel in the political and cultural context of its creation and discuss its iconography and propaganda content. In doing so, I will also consider some other expiatory monuments of the Restoration era. Then, I will focus on the queen's chapel as a memorial and historical site. I will especially raise the question as to whether notions of authenticity had been accounted for by the authorities and artists who were involved in the chapel's construction. With this twofold approach I particularly want to broaden the art-history research perspective which until now has been focused on the iconography and political relevance of the Restoration's expiatory monuments.[3] (Read more.)

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Americans, Learn From the UK’s Grooming Gang Scandal

 From AMAC:

A grooming scandal that has been discussed for years in London is finally getting attention.

MPs and London Assembly members are demanding an urgent investigation into grooming gangs in the city. They say authorities have failed to act on reports from survivors about the systematic abuse and exploitation of girls as young as 14.

This comes after a BBC investigation uncovered stories of young women being drugged, assaulted by multiple men, and forced into sex work to pay off drug debts. These cases are similar to those in Rotherham and Rochdale, where thousands of girls were abused over many years.

The letter, signed by figures such as Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp and former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith, was sent to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and London Mayor Sadiq Khan. It calls for the national inquiry into grooming gangs to focus on London.

Khan has been criticized for saying there were “no reports and no indication” of organized abuse in the city and for not addressing questions about whether Muslim rape gangs have operated there. Critics now accuse him of ignoring the issue.

The Metropolitan Police are reviewing 9,000 child sexual exploitation cases, with estimates suggesting that 2,000 to 3,000 involve grooming gangs. As in earlier scandals, most suspects are men of Pakistani heritage accused of targeting white English non-Muslim girls.

Grooming gangs have operated for decades and have faced little interference, with group-based child exploitation dating back to at least the mid-1970s. Authorities often overlooked these crimes while focusing on other types of child abuse. The problem became widely known in the 1990s and 2000s, but institutional failures allowed it to continue.

Nearly 100 trials and convictions have occurred in over 40 towns and cities across the U.K., including Rotherham, where more than 1,400 victims were identified between 1997 and 2013, as well as in Rochdale, Oxford, Telford, and Huddersfield.

Despite this, London’s mayor has said there are no such cases, or none on the same scale, in the capital. This has led to public anger, especially as the Metropolitan Police review thousands of old cases. (Read more.)

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How American Sexuality Was Ruined

 Disturbing. Read with discernment. From Welcome to Absurdistan:

Kinsey’s conclusion, promoted like wild fire for fifty years, relentless and geopathic by the Rockefeller-guided press, has embedded itself in our consciences, like the Rockefeller-promoted Paul Erlich and his every-word-a-lie-population bomb, climate change and the Sixth Great Extinction, all lies. Reissman’s keystone, necessary work traces that, and it is instructive to remember that Time Inc., where I was trained, is located in Rockefeller Centre. Time’s stable of magazines slowly, over time, promoted sexual libertinage as normal and the Rockefellers acted like censors on the rest of the media, stamping out anyone who objected. Reisman herself was the victim of a $50,000 a month PR campaign meant to ruin her and malign her research.

Alfred Kinsey was a barely talented biologist focused on a subspecies of wasp before the Rockefellers picked him up, almost certainly because he was part of the underground cult of people who sexually abuse children. He showed no promise otherwise. He was a sado-masochist whose family films found in the attic after his death showed him sexually and physically abusing his children. He literally masturbated himself to death - orchitis - which is associated with sado-masochistic trauma and venereal disease.

According to Reisman who made his work a life-long study, he did not complete his medical degree. He was an obsessed eugenicist, an atheist, adulterous misogynist, committed racist, a reckless bi/homosexual, addicted masturbator, masochist, pornography producer and performer, and mass pedosadist. (Read more.)

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The Queen's Agony

Her neck never stopped aching from the vise-like grip with which his short arms had locked around her, refusing to let go, as the commissaries began to drag him from her arms. His cries of "Maman! Maman!" echoed within her still. Her heart was not broken, it was gone. ~from Trianon by Elena Maria Vidal, Chapter Seven: "The Sacrifice"

On July 3, 1793, eight year old Louis XVII was forcibly removed from his mother the Queen. His sister Madame Royale later described the scene thus:

On the 3d of July, they read to us a decree of the Convention, that my brother should be separated from us, and placed in the most secure apartment of the tower. As p223soon as he heard this sentence pronounced, he threw himself into the arms of my mother, and entreated, with violent cries, than to be separated from her. My mother was stricken to the earth by this cruel order; she would not part with her son, and she actually defended, against the efforts of the officers, the bed in which she had placed him. But these men would have him, and threatened to call up the guard, and use violence. My mother exclaimed, that they had better kill her than tear the child from her. An hour was spent in resistance on her part, and in prayers and tears on the part of all of us.

At last they threatened even the lives of both him and me, and my mother's maternal tenderness at length forced her to this sacrifice. My aunt and I dressed the child, for my poor mother had no longer strength for any thing. Nevertheless, when he was dressed, she took him and delivered him herself into the hands of the officers, bathing him with her tears, foreseeing that she was never to see him again. The poor little fellow embraced us all tenderly, and was carried off in a flood of tears. My mother charged the officers to ask the council-general for permission to see her son, were it only at meals. They engaged to do so. She was overwhelmed with the sorrow of parting with him, but her horror was extreme when she heard that one Simon62 (a shoemaker by trade, whom she had seen as a municipal officer in the Temple), was the person to whom her unhappy child was confided. She asked continually to be allowed to see him, but in vain. He, on his side, cried for two whole days, and begged without intermission to be permitted to see us.

~Private Memoirs, by Madame Royale, Duchess of Angoulême, translated by John Wilson Croker. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1823, pp 223-225.

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Outrage Hypocrisy: America’s Accidental Tragedy vs. Iran’s Deliberate Atrocities

 From AMAC:

The recent U.S. Tomahawk missile strike in Iran, which reportedly killed 170 school children, has ignited a firestorm of outrage from anti-war critics. Former Clinton White House staffer Keith Boykin used the unintentional tragedy, under investigation by the Pentagon, to write off the three-week-old Iran war as “a disaster for the 170 school children” and “an unmitigated disaster for the world.”

Apart from the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian protesters killed early this year, consider Iran’s intentional history of using its children during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War. To repel Saddam Hussein’s invasion, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini mobilized child soldiers — boys as young as 9 or 12 — from poor families to serve as human minesweepers. Children were promised martyrdom and given “keys to paradise” to wear around their necks. Iranian commanders sent waves of them, often tied them together with ropes to prevent retreat. They marched onto minefields and detonated explosives with their bodies, clearing paths for tanks and adult troops.

Estimates suggest as many as 500,000 children were used in this way, with tens of thousands blown to pieces or mowed down by Iraqi machine guns. Some sources suggest some 100,000 died to clear the field for tanks and soldiers. Survivors recount the horror — bound together, facing withering fire, their small bodies exploding on mines. Iran’s leaders glorified it as holy duty.

The depravity is staggering. Iran treats its own children like disposable tools, exploiting their poverty and brainwashing them with visions of post-death paradise.

What would Iran do with a nuclear bomb?

Imagine the mullahs, who chant “Death to America” and fund proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas, armed with nukes and missiles. They would not hesitate to threaten Israel, Saudi Arabia, Europe and America. Iran, since the state of this war, has launched strikes against over a dozen countries, including “neutral” gulf states. (Read more.)

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The Furnished Soul

 From Becoming Noble:

Consider, by contrast, the experience of walking into a home that has been ordered around conviction. One feels it immediately, before a word is spoken: a warmth, a seriousness, a coherence. The objects communicate.

A crucifix above the door, a portrait of a grandfather on the staircase, a kneeler in the corner of a bedroom — together they compose something like a creed in material form. To enter such a house is to be consoled, even if you cannot articulate why.

The foundation of this consolation is metaphysical. Christianity, and the natural law tradition which it inherits and perfects, holds that the material world is not a blank canvas upon which we impose arbitrary meaning. It is already saturated with meaning.

Every created thing, by virtue of its existence, participates in and points toward the God who made it. Thomas Aquinas called these the vestigia Dei — the traces or footprints of God in creation. They are everywhere. In the grain of wood and the weight of stone, in the behavior of light through glass, in the structure of the human body and the rhythm of the seasons.

There are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see.

This is what makes a sacramental vision of the world possible. A sacramental world is one in which things really mean things, and it is only when this is the case that we can use them as a symbolic language to speak to one another through form, image, and metaphor.

The medieval cosmos was one in which everything was intentional and meaningful, ordered by a Creator who does nothing without purpose. The modern cosmos is one in which everything is accidental and inert, and meaning is a projection of temporary will. The difference between these two visions is perceptible in every room we inhabit.

“For since the creation of the world,” St. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “God’s invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” (Read more.)

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The First Spring Day

I wonder if the sap is stirring yet,
If wintry birds are dreaming of a mate,
If frozen snowdrops feel as yet the sun
And crocus fires are kindling one by one:
Sing, robin, sing!
I still am sore in doubt concerning Spring.

I wonder if the spring-tide of this year
Will bring another Spring both lost and dear;
If heart and spirit will find out their Spring,
Or if the world alone will bud and sing:
Sing, hope, to me!
Sweet notes, my hope, soft notes for memory.

The sap will surely quicken soon or late,
The tardiest bird will twitter to a mate;
So Spring must dawn again with warmth and bloom,
Or in this world, or in the world to come:
Sing, voice of Spring!
Till I too blossom and rejoice and sing.

By Christina Rossetti

(Artwork "The First Buds of Spring" by Lionel Percy Smythe, courtesy of Hermes.) Share

The Radical Left is the Enemy From Within

 From Right Flank:

For years, Democrats have assumed complete, covert ownership of mainstream news outlets. It’s for this very reason that pundits will NEVER admit the truth about political polarization in our country. As leftists got more extreme and unglued from reality, the news ran stories about the so called “far right.” In their eyes, exercising common sense and supporting our Constitution is “far right.” This label has been so thoroughly abused that it’s now lost ALL meaning. As an American, if you (in any way!) oppose medically mutilating children, killing unborn babies in the womb, or having the government censor what’s said on social media, you’re deemed “far right.”

Even after this study from the Royal Society, we shouldn’t expect Democrats to suddenly have a change of heart. If Democrats really cared about this country, they’d look at the Royal Society’s findings and change their behavior. Instead, they’re just LYING about what the study reported, pretending as if the facts aren’t clear. Across social media, propaganda campaigns are already in full swing. Leftists’ most common talking points? The study “misrepresents” key points, the data was “cherry picked,” and “biases” colored the findings reported upon.

Unfortunately, this is quite typical for Democrats. Whenever they see a report, opinion, or social media post they don’t like, the attacks on credibility always come next. They’re INCAPABLE of self reflecting or paying attention to what matters most in our country. (Read more.)

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At the Edge of the Abyss: Euthanasia and the Fight For Human Dignity.

 From Gavin Ashenden:

Those of us who hold to a Catholic understanding of the human person — seeing each life as sacred because it is made in the image of God — have, for decades now, found ourselves resisting a growing secular pressure to legalise euthanasia.

The arguments are by now familiar. On the one hand, we hear appeals to autonomy, freedom of choice, and the understandable desire to avoid suffering. On the other, there remains a deep moral conviction that life and death are not ours to dispose of at will — and that once the boundary is crossed, the consequences are neither contained nor benign.

Experience bears this out. In Canada, there are now documented cases of disabled individuals being offered euthanasia because it is cheaper than providing basic support such as accessible housing. In the Netherlands, even teenagers suffering from depression have been granted euthanasia. What were once presented as tightly safeguarded exceptions have, in practice, expanded in ways that place the most vulnerable at risk.

The argument, therefore, is no longer theoretical. It is grounded in real examples of systems in which safeguards have failed, and where the logic of euthanasia has begun to erode the dignity it was supposed to protect.

In this conversation, I speak with Professor David Jones, Professor of Bioethics at St Mary’s University, London, and one of the central figures in the campaign against euthanasia in the United Kingdom.

Together we explore what has just taken place in the Scottish Parliament, why the proposed legislation was defeated, and what this may mean for the future of similar efforts at Westminster — where time is running short and the outcome remains finely balanced, both procedurally and in the court of public opinion. (Read more.)

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