As a little boy, I saw images in a textbook of French Revolutionaries delighting over the heads of their foes . . . including the head of their Queen, Marie-Antoinette, and a truth pierced my heart: Any cause that has to murder women and children in cold blood, as public policy, and revels in death to gain and keep power is foul and unworthy. When atheism began to butcher women, children, priests, and nuns as political policy, the evil of the regime was revealed.
All regimes have bad moments and many have evil periods. Revolutions concentrate the evil. Tom Paine, who wrote one good work and many fatuous ones, attempted to justify the Revolution in France by pointing to the abuses of the Old Regime, but he made a critical error. Over time, France was liberalizing and Louis XVI and his Queen were no tyrants. France rebelled when the Bastille was nearly empty and many old abuses were gone. Paine urged rebellion against the crimes of centuries, but those crimes had taken place over centuries and the Revolutionaries would match and surpass them in weeks.
Revolutionaries need perfect justice now and incremental change is not fast enough and so the perfect is made the enemy of the good. They must humiliate a powerless wife and mother making a human into a symbol, lying about her to the public, demonizing her actions, and then cutting off her head in a spectacle. She was flawed, like all of us are, but she attempted to change with times she had not prepared to face. Revolutionaries demonized her for being an accomplished woman by lying about her morality. She never said of the poor “let them eat cake,” but that lie is all many know of her now.
The Left of France, like atheist revolutionaries of every age, was a godless ISIS rejoicing in blood and hating beauty.
Americans owe some debt to the Queen as she pushed France into our own war for independence, but in pop culture we have trivialized her political influence and sexualized her memory. America’s ability to mistreat or forget our friends is not our most endearing trait.
Let’s be plain: nobody sensible would simply restore the Old Regime. Its time was passing and the King and Queen did not adapt fast enough to changes that were necessary. Their example saved the British monarchy and several other Royal Houses who learned that they could change or die. Yet many reject the urge to “remake the world” that is the heart of so much evil done in the world. This evil exists in revolutionary movements on the left most obviously, but it also existed in reactionary homeschool groups who attempt to create a counter-culture out of nothing. Just as revolutions almost always do more harm than good, these counter-cultures do more harm than good.
Change must be organic to a culture, respect life, and allow as many as possible to come along. The alternative is dreadful. The Queen reminds us that living a mixed life, full of bad choices as well as good, can still end triumphantly. Marie Antoinette died more bravely than the French Revolutionaries lived. In the rough justice of revolutions, most would also face Madame Guillotine, but few would match her courage and none would go with hands unstained with terror.
As we face another time of change may we reject revolution… and if we find ourselves winners, do to the losers as we would wish they had done to us. Tom Paine, the old fool, was wise enough to know that killing the Queen was a mistake, but not wise enough to see that the illogical of revolution would destroy all moderation.
Now is the time for moderation and now is the time for leaders who would never cut the head off a middle aged woman and revel in her blood.
Edmund Burke sums up what all good men feel in the death of Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France:
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the Dauphiness, 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 splendor and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what an 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 honor, 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. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness!
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In