#i just want to underline a parameter that hasn't been sufficiently discussed imo

[la-pheacienne]

I am going to be a killjoy and choose violence again but I did not like the spectacle of Marie Antoinette holding her decapitated head in her arms in the olympics, at all. I don't give a shit about Marie Antoinette the person, she was a traitor in the context of a war and she would rather betray France than give away her privileges. This is what happens to traitors in that context and she absolutely had it coming. I won't shed one tear for her, sorry if that bothers people.

However. The executions of the Terror are not something to make a spectacle of, they are not something to mock. They were an inevitability, a historical necessity yes, but they are not an esthetic, nor a pop culture reference. They were inevitable, even necessary because of the revolutionary context, because it was the people of France who demanded those executions, and when I say the people of France I mean the working class, the peasants, the sans culottes, people who lived in extreme poverty and misery. This was not just a civil war, this was a class war. Centuries of class inequality, oppression, hunger, injustice, needed a release and that release was inevitable, but the factors that led to it, the structural inequality, the privilege, the injustice, they are still relevant today. Those people, the people of France, did not ask for the king and queen's head so that, two centuries later, the political and economical elites of this world can sit comfortably in the seat they paid hundreds or even thousands of euros for, and mock and have fun watching Antoinette's decapitated head in a spectacle that cost around 300 millions, the same political and economical elites that are right now funding genocides, that are right now maximising their profit off the Olympics, that are right now destroying the welfare system and impoverishing the people of France, who are unemployed, homeless, and stuck in ghettos. But it's alright I guess, because we have democracy now so these people can still watch the spectacle in their TV (if they have a TV) from their 9 square meter apartment in Sarcelles or Seine-Saint-Denis that takes 80% of their salary. If they have an apartment. They must feel really lucky they don't have a king or queen anymore and all their problems are solved. What a fine mockery. I don't think the Jacobins would be impressed with this turn of events, I don't think that's why the french revolution happened because the french revolution is not an esthetic and the social struggles that led to it are still here, very much present.

I would advise people to leave Antoinette's head alone because she's dead and has been dead for 250 years. There are a lot of heads that are far too comfortable in their class privilege, right now, in 2024.