Sunday Pages: "Jack and Jill"

A nursery rhyme by Mother Goose

Dear Reader,

Marie Antoinette never said Let them eat cake.

We think maybe Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote those words, but with “brioche” instead of “cake,” which at least has some nutritional value. But the Queen’s authorship of one of history’s best-known quotations is apocryphal. Chalk one up to the Jacobin propaganda machine.

People only thought she said Let them eat cake because Let them eat cake was exactly the sort of tone-deaf, un-self-aware thing Marie Antoinette would have said. The former Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria was not one to deny herself pleasure, whether in the form of food, drink, sex, wealth, or fashion. Nor did she seem capable of empathizing with her subjects—even the less miserable of les misérables. Few humans have managed to be exceptionally gauche and exceptionally á la mode at the same time.

Marie Antoinette burned through cash—and cash in 1780s France was in short supply, the king having spent so much of it financing, among other things, the American War of Independence (merci, Louis). She was responsible for so many extravagant expenditures that if Elon Musk sent his DOGE boys back in time, they would have been able to cut spending that was actually wasteful.

Wags of the ancien régime called her Madame Déficit—which is somehow even cleverer because of the accent aigu—on account of her obscenely lavish lifestyle juxtaposed with national bread shortages and financial unrest. That Marie wound up being falsely accused, in the so-called Affair of the Diamond Necklace, of defrauding the Crown jeweler, didn’t change the fact that most people believed she was guilty of defrauding the Crown jeweler in something called the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. (We say “necklace,” but the piece looks more like elaborate chainmail worn by some fancy cosplayer at Ren Faire.)

The libelles, the tabloid rags of the day, attacked her savagely. Marie was accused of prodigality, of blocking all attempts by the finance minister to help the economy, of sexual deviance (especially her rumored sexual attraction to other women, then known as “the German vice”), of high treason for repeatedly siding with her native Austria over France, of serial adultery (historians are still debating whether the father of her son Louis Charles was the king or her swashbuckling Swedish lover, the wonderfully-named Axel von Fersen the Younger), and—and this is the one charge she vehemently denied and was almost certainly untrue, even though the accuser was her own son—incest.

In short, Marie Antoinette came to personify everything the French Revolution opposed. She was tout that was wrong with the country, poured into a tight-bodiced muslin gown, with poufs and panaches and enough jewels to fill the nave at Notre-Dame.

As for her husband? Louis XVI was so soft, he made King Charles III look like Genghis Khan. He floated around on a cloud, spending his time hunting and fiddling with locks and being comically (and later tragically) unaware. On affairs of state, he generally did whatever his wife told him to do, and—zut alors!—her political instincts were as wretched as her fashion sense was exquisite.

Even after the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, the King and Queen remained alive and well. The people sought merely to establish a constitutional monarchy, like Britain enjoyed, not to abolish the crown entirely. It was only after Louis and Marie Antoinette broke their promise to consent to the plan, and were found to be conspiring with foreign nations to retain their power, and, when the conspiracy failed, launched a ham-handed attempt to flee—they dressed as servants of some made-up princess and were busted in less than 24 hours at Varennes, an event so shocking and terrifying that the 35-year-old Queen’s hair, in the words of her Lady of the Bedchamber, “in a single night…turned as white as that of a seventy-year-old woman”—only then, well into 1791, did the authorities remove them from Versailles to the Tuileries.

And even then, there were no active plans to guillotine them. But Marie once again conspired with the Austrians, a treachery made clear in the discovery of the Brunswick Manifesto, so Wren et Roi were removed to a proper prison, and the monarchy formally abolished. By then it was August 1792. Louis XVI was executed in January 1793, after being found guilty of treason in a trial Maximilien Robespierre, nominally the head of the Committee of Public Safety but by then the despotic leader of the Reign of Terror, vehemently opposed:

Louis was a king, and our republic is established; the critical question concerning you must be decided by these words alone. Louis was dethroned by his crimes; Louis denounced the French people as rebels; he appealed to chains, to the armies of tyrants who are his brothers; the victory of the people established that Louis alone was a rebel; Louis cannot, therefore, be judged; he already is judged. He is condemned, or the republic cannot be absolved. To propose to have a trial of Louis XVI, in whatever manner one may, is to retrogress to royal despotism and constitutionality; it is a counter-revolutionary idea because it places the revolution itself in litigation. In effect, if Louis may still be given a trial, he may be absolved, and innocent. What am I saying? He is presumed to be so until he is judged. But if Louis is absolved, if he may be presumed innocent, what becomes of the revolution? If Louis is innocent, all the defenders of liberty become slanderers.

The best we can say of the king is that, when it was his time to mount the gallows, he did not snivel, whine, or beg. Louis XVI behaved like a proper royal. He died like a monarch. He held his head up high—until that same head dropped into the bucket, and was then held aloft by his own royal executioner to a cheering crowd.

And Marie Antoinette? I will let Thomas Jefferson, who’d helped Lafayette pen the Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du citoyen de 1789, answer: “Her inordinate gambling and dissipations, with those of the Count d’Artois, and others of her clique, had been a sensible item in the exhaustion of the treasury, which called into action the reforming hand of the nation; and her opposition to it, her inflexible perverseness, and dauntless spirit, led herself to the Guillotine,” which happened nine months after the execution of her husband.

“I have ever believed that, had there been no Queen, there would have been no revolution.”

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That I have Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI on the brain should come as no surprise to anyone who saw video clips and photographs, or heard tell, of the wedding of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the former entertainment reporter Lauren Sánchez, a four-day gala affair held this past week in Venice, Italy, that quite literally cost a fortune.

While I question his taste in romantic partners, I don’t begrudge Bezos his nuptial celebration; let him shovel some of his grotesque wealth back into the economy. What’s disgusting, and what calls to mind Marie Antoinette, is the very public extravagance of the wedding—the if-you-got-it-flaunt-it spirit of the affair—starkly juxtaposed with 1) the rise of fascism in the United States; 2) Bezos’s active role, as publisher of the once-great Washington Post, of installing and abetting our new fascist dictator; 3) Sánchez’s garish fashion choices at the White House state dinner and the Inauguration; and, 4) the looming passage of a “Big Beautiful Bill” that will cause real harm to tens of millions of Americans and complete the greatest wealth transfer in the history of the world—all those trillions going from the poor and the middle class to, basically, Jeff and Lauren and their wedding guests.

To have that kind of wedding at this moment in history is…

“It’s a ‘Let them eat cake’ moment,” LB remarked to me yesterday. This morning, on BlueSky, she elaborated: “Only truly grotesque Americans would flock to Venice to lavish in obscene wealth at the very moment Medicaid is stripped from millions of vulnerable people. Never forget who went to that wedding.”

Call the guests the Venetian Blind—because they can’t see what’s happening. The list includes the Kardashian clan, Jared and Ivanka, Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King, Tom Brady, Usher, Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, Ellie Goulding, Sydney Sweeney, Karlie Kloss, Sam Altman, Diane von Furstenberg, and—say it ain’t so!—Mick Jagger, who I guess really does have sympathy for the devil.

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Here are some lessons from the French Revolution:

• Don’t finance wars on credit.

• If you do finance wars on credit, don’t repudiate the debt.

• If you have a choice between raising taxes on the wealthy or repudiating the debt, raise taxes on the wealthy.

• Don’t luxuriate in lavish splendor while your people suffer in poverty.

• There is a point where luxuriating in lavish splendor while your people suffer in poverty will prompt said people to form an angry mob and remove you from power.

• After that happens, money and status will not save you.

• The surest way to end a monarchy is to kill the king and the royal family.

The United States in 2025 is some horrible combination of 1930s Germany and 1780s France. We have a ruling class disconnected from the needs of the poor, working- and middle classes. We have an irrationally exuberant stock market that has no basis in earnings reports or accurate company valuations. We have oligarchs plundering state resources. We have a rising dictator, dumb as a fence post, with Louis XVI taste in décor. We have a whole fashion associated with the ruling class, a uniform way its women and its men are expected to look. We are constructing concentration camps in the Florida Everglades, where alligators prowl. We have a national debt verging on the unsustainable, a result of cutting taxes while waging wars in far-flung locales. We have a smirking ruling class whose cruelty is exceeded only by its utter lack of self-awareness. We have a Lorenz Curve bulging like the president’s belly after feasting at the omelet bar. We have soldiers operating on U.S. soil in violation of the Constitution. We have a Gestapo, a secret state police, carrying out the dictator’s orders, however unlawful. We have a nation of FoxNews watchers in denial that any of this is happening. We have an effete opposition party that is unwilling or unable to fight back. We have a clergy that mostly supports the king. We have people in the streets.

We have anger—righteous anger.

History tells us that this heightened level of simultaneous political, economic, social, cultural, and religious volatility is not sustainable. History tells us something’s about to give. The center cannot hold, things will fall apart. Or, as Mick Jagger put it back in 1969, when he could still read the writing on the wall:

War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

Rape, murder
It’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

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That Louis XVI would lose his head was not a foregone conclusion. Robespierre claimed not to approve of capital punishment—but in the case of treason, he determined that it was necessary:

Yes, the death penalty is, in general, a crime, unjustifiable by the indestructible principles of nature, except in cases protecting the safety of individuals or the society altogether. Ordinary misdemeanors have never threatened public safety because society may always protect itself by other means, making those culpable powerless to harm it. But for a king dethroned in the bosom of a revolution, which is as yet cemented only by laws; a king whose name attracts the scourge of war upon a troubled nation; neither prison nor exile can render his existence inconsequential to public happiness; this cruel exception to the ordinary laws avowed by justice can be imputed only to the nature of his crimes. With regret, I pronounce this fatal truth: Louis must die so that the nation may live.

Pace Mel Brooks, sometimes it’s not good to be the king.

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Mother Goose was not, as far as we can tell, a real person, but a fictitious character, dating back at least to the late 18th century, to whom certain anonymously-authored nursery rhymes are attributed. I would argue that “Jack and Jill” is the best known of any of them:

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water;
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.

An odd verse: what does it mean?

Jack is really Jacques—a Frenchman—Louis XVI. The hill is the gallows. The pail is the bucket in which the severed head lands. Water is royal blood—blue blood. Fell down is putting his neck beneath the hanging blade. Broke his crown is both the beheading of the king and the obliteration of the monarchy—a neat double entendre.

Jill is the Queen—Marie Antoinette. Came tumbling is what her head does after the guillotine separates it from her neck. After is a reference to when she was executed: in October 1793, nine months after Louis XVI was put to death. (The other, more obscure verses of the rhyme refer to Madame Tussaud making the death masks of the king and queen.)

The final humiliation of the extravagant, out of touch, and empathy-deficient Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was that the chronicle of their bloody, awful deaths was distilled into a nursery rhyme that’s been merrily recited by little children the world over for 21 decades and counting. You’d like to think this cautionary tale has been dumbed down enough so that even Donald can understand it.

(Mick Jagger: My riches can’t buy everything / I want to hear the children sing.)

Robespierre held that the king must die so that the nation may live. But it is not enough merely to survive. What he really meant was this:

The king must die so that the nation may prevail.

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ICYMI

Fantastic episode of The Five 8. Our guest was the brilliant Molly McKew. If you’re feeling gaslit and down, I highly recommend listening to this one: