How one victim of the French Revolution came to her end

This is from Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revoluion, by Simon Schama, 1989 (pp. 624-25, 635):

During the two weeks between the seventeenth of August and the prison massacres in early September [1792], more than a thousand people were taken into custody on the flimsiest warrants. The vast majority of them were refractory priests taken from seminaries, colleges and churches—sometimes even from private houses where they had been hidden in lay dress…. The whole of the royalist press was shut down overnight, its editors and printers arrested and their equipment staved in. Other less obviously threatening enemies of the “sovereign people” were also peremptorily seized, including virtually all the personal servants of the King and Queen…. The biggest catch in this descent on the court, though, was Marie-Antoinette’s old friend the Princesse de Lamballe. Cold-shouldered by the Queen since the rise of the Polignac clique, Elisabeth had remained touchingly loyal. When the Polignac sisters had headed for the frontier along with Artois in 1789, she decided to remain with the Queen and became her mistress of the household. Though repeated waves of pornography routinely depicted her as a lesbian whore, she could not have looked less the part. Her blond curls had lost their sheen and spring, but her face still possessed an extraodinary churubic quality, as though permanently posing for one of Greuze’s doe-eyed portraits. At the Temple prison, where the royal family had been taken after three days in the Logographie of the Manège, she continued to wait on the Queen. The guards who came for her and the other servants told them they were being taken only for interrogation, but both Elisabeth and Marie-Antoinette evidently feared they would not see each other again. They embraced with the kind of valedictory tenderness that the defamatory press inevitably reported as licentious….

[LA: Note how the left used to attack homosexuality, as associated with upper-class decadence. Another example is the aristocratic homosexual villains in Howard Fast’s Spartacus, written in the 1950s. How different are things today!]

At La Force, the Princesse de Lamballe passed the time by reading devotional manuals and attempting to comfort the terrified ladies-in-waiting to the Queen. Confronted by another of the improvised courts that would be judge, jury and executioner, she was asked if she knew of the “plots of the tenth of August” and responded courageously that she was aware of no plots on that day. Required to swear an oath of loyalty to Liberty and Equality and one of hatred to the King, Queen and monarchy, she accepted the first but refused the latter. A door was opened off the interrogation room, where she saw men waiting with axes and pikes. Pushed into an alley she was hacked to death in minutes. Her clothes were stripped from her body to join the immense pile that would later be sold at public auction, and her head was struck off and stuck on a pike. Some accounts, including that of Mercier, insist on the obscene mutilation and display of her genitals, a story which Caron dismissess with the cloistered certainty of the archivist as intrinsically inconceivable. What is certain is that her head was carried in triumph through the streets of Paris to the Temple, where one of the crowd barged into the King’s rooms to demand that the Queen show herself at the window to see her friend’s head, “so you may know how the people avenge themselves on tyrants.” Marie-Antoinette spared herself this torment by fainting on the spot, but the valet de chambre Cléry peered through his blinds to see the blond curls of the Princesse de Lamballe bobbing repellently in the air.

More on the Princesse de Lamballe, the most famous victim of the massacres of September 1792, can be read here, here, and here. - end of initial entry -

Howard Sutherland writes:

When I said in an e-mail that you were not likely to find Citizens cheering convalescence reading, the Princesse de Lamballe’s death was one of the episodes I was remembering. Also the story of another lady – I cannot remember her name – literally crushed, burnt alive and dismembered by the mob. And also the mass barge drowning/murders in the Loire and the endless parade of horrors and slaughter the revolutionists inflicted on the Vendée.

What was most horrifying to me about Citizens is the sense Schama gives of an entire nation gone insane, caught up in revolutionary enthusiasm and given over to envy and bloodlust. Even the Bolshevik Revolution, carnival of sadism and death that it was, doesn’t give the impression that the entire Russian nation was caught up in Bolshevik enthusiasm, but that the revolution was something imposed on the Russians and the other nations so unfortunate as to be imprisoned within the Russian Empire-become-USSR.

As a Vendéen and faithful Catholic, Philippe de Villiers knows too much history to worship at the altar of the revolution. That is one of the things I like best about him: de Villiers knows that most of French history, including the parts that do the French the most credit, happened before 1789.VII.14! For Ségolène Royal, and probably Sarkozy too, there was no France before Louis XVI’s head was lopped off his shoulders.

(1789.VII.14 signifies July 14, 1789. It’s a fairly standard European dating system that has the virtue of being tied to no specific language. French documents often use it.)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 02, 2007 08:54 AM | Send