Phamphlets For and Against
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Phamphlets For and Against • Pathos, Bathos, and Bibliophily
Marie Antoinette was the subject of many of the thousands of pamphlets published during the French Revolution. The Newberry Library's collection is particularly strong in pamphlets of the sort.
Before the revolution, the queen's progresses through the city of Paris were chronicled in elegant official publications like that of 1785. A similar occasion a year after the fall of the Bastille is recounted in the Details of 1790. The pamphleteer's goal was to show the continuing popular affection for the royal family, demonstrated on occasions when the royals appeared in public. Marie's own Grande Lettre of 1791 (attributed to her by the printers but actually authored by a partisan) was a similar royalist tract.
Détails de tout...
Case FRC Supplement 3068
Grande lettre...
Case FRC 4131
Early on, however, republican revolutionaries fastened on the figure of the queen as a symbol of all that was wrong with the old order. Their prose could take many forms. In one piece, Marie Antoinette is the subject of gossip among earlier queens all now enthroned in hell. Others recounted Marie's alleged adulterous affairs in lurid detail, associated her with her husband's political blunders, or accused her of conspiring with leaders of the opposition to the revolution.
The London caricature here is an imaginative and largely sympathetic depiction of an incident in which the queen's bedroom was searched for incriminating letters.