Folder 5 Anna Gardner: speech “French Revolution”

For my paper this evening, I have been assigned a period of history in which the most sanguinary conflict the world ever beheld was inaugurated and executed with relentless cruelty, -- The French Revolution: holding Democracy in the throes and convulsion of a terrible unheaval. I am to give the political phase of the career of Marie Antoinette.

Lamartine epitomized her career in a pen-picture wonderfully comprehensive in its brevity when he says: Whether in consequence of the elevation of her rank, the great influence she had on the Revolution,

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or the immensity of her misfortunes, Marie Antoinette among the heroic women of the French Revolution, is entitled to pre-eminence.

She was the daughter of Kings-- the wife and mother of Kings-- the cynosure of all eyes in the most elegant and polished capital of the world, the envied and admired of all beholders for station, personal charms and all the accessories which power, a throne and youth can bring to happiness.

She lived to see that power annihilated-- her throne overtuned-- her husband murdered, her friends

and adherents massacred or exiled, her son handed over to a profligate and debased ruffian, herself in a dungeon and in rags, deprived of the comforts-- the common necessities of life-- and there debarred of all the sympathies that make life desirable.

Marie Antoinette was a woman who, in any station of life, would have ben celebrated for the excellence of her womanly qualities, and, withal-- she was a peerless beauty. her intellect and mental acquirements were so superior that were she living to-day, she would acquire the enviable distinction of being called strong-minded--

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