There has never have been a solid historical consensus as to whether the great Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke should be regarded as a radical or a conservative, and his own contemporaries often couldn’t decide either. Whatever his politics, he was certainly a romantic: his description, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) of encountering the 19-year-old Marie-Antoinette in the glorious flesh demands to be quoted at length:
‘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 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 for ever. 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....’
Burke was clearly utterly smitten, and his contemporaries seized upon this extract to have a go at him; an admirer of Burke’s called it simple ‘foppery’ and Tom Paine. in his response to Burke’s reflections, Rights of Man (1791), noted with calm disdain that Burke ‘pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird’ (see also 1797: Napoleon invites Tom Paine to dinner and asks him how to invade England).
What Happened Next
Burke was writing before Marie-Antoinette’s execution in 1793, and she died bravely. Her husband had been guillotined in January, and she had suffered much in jail; even her 8-year-old son had been taken from her (he died in 1795) and she said that she had come to realise that suffering is what makes you what you are. She went to the scaffold in October, apologising for stepping on the executioner’s foot. And she never at any point in her life said ‘let them cake’ when told the poor had no bread. See also 1775: Robespierre makes a speech in the rain to Louis XVI.