709. The Terror: The Execution of Marie Antoinette (Part 3)

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphinesse, at Versailles, and surely 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 just began to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendour and joy. Oh, what a revolution! And what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall.

Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace Concealed in that bosom, little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult, but the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. So that's one of the most celebrated pieces of prose ever written about the French Revolution.

It was written by the Anglo Irish politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, often seen as one of the godfathers of conservatism. Burke wrote those words in 1790. So very early on in the revolution, he was prompted by the tumultuous events really of 1789, the march on Versailles by a mob of market women and of revolutionary militants, the attack by night on the apartments of the Queen of France, which had sent her running barefoot to the bedchamber of her husband to seek sanctuary, and the removal of the royal family to Paris, never to return to Versailles. Tom, to Edmund Burke, as to so many like minded people across Europe, this was practically sacrilegious, wasn't it?

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