Modern History Sourcebook:
Edmund Burke:
The Death of Marie Antoinette
Edmund Burke (1729-1797), born in Dublin, Ireland, was a member
of the British House of Commons. After the French Revolution,
Burke became an important critic of the Revolution and the effective
founder of modern conservative political ideology. Although he
had serious reasons for his politics, there is also an element
of nostalgia about in his perspectives. In this brief speech he
laments the death of the Queen and the passing of an era.
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 had just begun to move in, glittering
like the morning star full of life and splendor and joy. 0, 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 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 defense 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.
Edmund Burke - 1793
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(c)Paul Halsall Aug 1997
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