A fairly tragic place. Not taking sides in the French Revolution, I have to think that the King and Queen were genuinely shocked to discover that their subjects wanted to kill them. There is such a sense of innocent, naive grievance in their own words - a letter that Marie Antoinette wrote to her sister, the last will and testament of Louis - carved on their monuments.
I still don't know quite how I feel about this hagiographic monument. The after-the-fact attempt to glorify the murdered rulers seems so blatant.... I guess it would be nice to have some accompanying exhibition about the conditions or motives of the revolutionaries, explaining why they felt so compelled to commit regicide.
The deaths of hundreds of Swiss Guards who had the responsibility of defending the Tuileries Palace are also commemorated here in a rose garden. Until this point, I had no knowledge that these Guards were killed in the Revolution, many of them massacred after surrendering, according to Wikipedia. (That said, the same Mighty Wiki also says that the Guards fired first upon the advancing crowd of revolutionaries, so might their subsequent deaths be somewhat justified? History is full of bloody moral questions such as these.)
For me, this was a sobering reminder that for all our attention on the 'headline names' - the King, the Queen, some of the leaders of the Revolution - there were hundreds and thousands of dead on all sides of the conflict who are nameless today but whose deaths were no less significant for themselves and their loved ones than the deaths that appear in the history books today. read more