The Day Chivalry Died - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

The Day Chivalry Died

On October 16, 1793, Marie Antoinette, Her Most Christian Majesty The Queen of France and Navarre, was murdered by the mobs of Paris.

 

Hillarie Belloc, who wrote a biography of the Queen, said of her life that “The Queen of France whose end is but an episode in the story of the Revolution stands apart in this: that while all around her were achieved the principal miracles of the human will, she alone suffered, by an unique exception, a fixed destiny against which the will seemed powerless. In person she was not considerable, in temperament not distinguished; but her fate was enormous.”

 

Belloc records that on the morning of her execution the tribunal sent her a priest, but when she discovered the priest had sworn the civic oath to the Republic and renounced communion with the Church she refused to see him and she shunned his presence as he accompanied her to the guillotine. With what Burke called her “serene patience, in a manner suited to her rank” she refused to recognize the legitimacy of a fraud. The painting by William Hamilton captures this historical fact by showing the wicked priest attempting to intervene before her, but her gaze is instead fixed on high.

 

I imagine this is the image Charles Dickens had in mind when he described the guillotine as an instrument that “hushed the eloquent, struck down the powerful, abolished the beautiful and good.”

 

No one better understood the enormous fate of this small episode than Edmund Burke. He said of the Queen’s treatment, “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.”

 

 

 

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