Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [50]
As Alexander Hamilton politely warned American Revolutionary hero the Marquis de Lafayette, after the storming of the Bastille, “I dread the vehement character of your people, whom I fear you may find it more easy to bring on than to keep within Proper bounds, after you have put them in motion.”3
Initially, the mob had worshipped Maria Antonia, the Austrian princess, christened “Marie Antoinette” upon her arrival in France to marry the future king, Louis-Auguste. Antoinette was young—only fifteen years old—slender, fair, and beautiful. Mobs like that sort of thing, so the people worshipped her. When Antoinette made her first public appearance in Paris, the cheering crowds were so thick, her carriage was frequently stopped for an hour at a time. The besotted Parisians presented the princess with flowers, fruits, salutes, and speeches all along her ride. Most enthusiastic were the common people. As Antoinette stood on a balcony gasping in astonishment at the throng cheering her, a nobleman, Marechal de Brissac, told her, “You have before you two hundred thousand persons who have fallen in love with you.”4
When Louis-Auguste assumed the throne a few years later, the masses hailed a new era of youth, freedom, hope, and change under their twenty-year-old king and nineteen-year-old queen. Though the new king and queen had done nothing and promised nothing, the masses adored them, putting their portrait up in all the shop windows.5 They were the French Obamas!
But as so often happens with mobs, the people’s passionate love would soon turn into equally passionate hate. As described by Le Bon, mobs “only entertain violent and extreme sentiments,” so “sympathy quickly becomes adoration, and antipathy almost as soon as it is aroused is transformed into hatred.”6
One sees traces of the phenomenon today in liberals’ love-to-hate feelings toward Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Tony Blair, Joe Lieberman, Israel, the Supreme Court, wood-burning fireplaces, free speech, cigarettes, and warm weather. Liberals went from love to hate with Christopher Hitchens when he attacked Clinton—but then he won them back with his attack on God. (What a Cinderella story!)
Inflamed by ugly gossip as well as food shortages and fiscal crises, the crowd began to detest the queen. She was called “l’Autrichienne,” meaning the Austrian, but with the stress on “chienne,” meaning “bitch.” In pamphlets and gossip, Antoinette was accused of being a nymphomaniac and a lesbian, of holding sex orgies in the palace, and of engaging in unnatural acts with her dog and infant son.7
Antoinette was nearly the exact opposite of the image invented by the mob and passed down in popular mythology. She was genuine, charitable, kind, and good-natured—more like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday than Hillary Clinton pocketing the White House silverware. She was not given to excess, avoided ostentation in her decorating style,8 and was compassionate toward the poor. Antoinette eliminated the class-based segregated seating at the royal palace and often invited children from working-class neighborhoods to dine with her children.
This “lovely woman with the gentle eyes,” as Antoinette biographer Stefan Zweig called her,9 told her mother that what had touched her most about the cheering crowd for her in Paris “was the affection and zeal of the poor people, which, though crushed with taxation, was overflowing with joy at the sight of us.” She called such love “infinitely precious.”10 Even years later, when the masses abused her, Marie Antoinette still described them charitably as “persons who declare themselves well-intentioned, but who do and will continue to do us harm.”11
Marie Antoinette never uttered the words “Let them eat cake.” Fittingly, that phrase came from the revolutionaries’ philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who claimed he overheard it on the lips of some nameless princess. This was written in his Confessions, sometime before 176912—back when