Early on in my pregnancy I became obsessed with learning everything I could about Marie Antoinette. And while reading the biography on her life by Antonia Fraser, I encountered an explanation for the death of the monarchy that came distinctly across as blood magic—the kind of magic large states and entities engage in all the time, to initiate a new rule, or perhaps just to feed themselves.
(You think we left mass ritual sacrifice behind with the old gods and the "primitive"? Please.)
The argument was basically this (I'm paraphrasing, so forgive me that in advance). I'll start with some context:
Louis XVI wasn't a tyrannous king, or an especially shit one. He was, by all accounts (nobles were prolific, gossipy letter writers and record keepers), stunningly mediocre and passive. He wasn't even his family's first choice for the throne, but his brother died, and nobody even bothered to boost his self-esteem; they made it pretty clear they had no faith in him, even to his face. Many of the problems of France, for which he and his wife would later be blamed, were inherited. (This is the case of most leaders; at the scale of a country, you have to be a rare maverick, for better or worse, to really effect changes that wouldn't have happened anyway.)
The same can be said for Marie-Antoinette. She's one in 15 children, all strategically placed throughout the ruling world by her mother. She's sickly, small, not especially pretty or clever. But an older sister dies and suddenly she's the best option for Queen of France. She barely has her period when they shunt her over the border; she is oversold and underripe, told all the hopes of Austria rest on her capacity to integrate (which she works hard to do, though she's never quite accepted) while maintaining Germanic rationality and considering Austrian interests (which she tries doing, generally unsuccessfully, because diplomacy is a skill she simply lacks).
So you've got these two kids with low self-esteem who were nobody's first choice for such important positions on the world stage. The ruling monarch, Louis XVI's grandfather, dies, and even Louis admits, "We are too young to rule." Monarchy's in a weird place; the settlers in the Americas—the exploitation of which made much of Europe rich and kicked off the international marketplace we inherited today—are threatening to overthrow their monarchial obligations. A Frenchman, La Fayette, is helping! He will later embroil France in the US's fight for freedom, then fight to overthrow the French monarchy, too!
Shit's messy.
I'm going to skip ahead because this isn't really about that; it's about how it ends. When the French constitution is being drafted, there are attempts to strip monarchial powers while maintaining the monarchy symbolically, like what England's done. Louis plays along, wisely but for the wrong reasons: He's trying to stay alive and protect his family. He thinks people will get tired of all this work and go back to the monarchy on their own. There's also lots of people jostling for power, within the country and without, interfering—ultimately fatally—with these tense relations between monarchy and newly self-appointed stewards of a nation.
You know the rest: This ends with Louis XVI dying. Marie Antoinette is "tried" and killed a few months later. Welcome to the French Republic.
The issue is why the people saw fit to kill them.
The deciders of the monarchy's destiny generally agreed Louis XVI wasn't a bad guy, despite those awkward times he was caught trying to escape gilded imprisonment. It was never about him. The issue was the unpardonability of monarchy. If you can find anything in monarchy to forgive, you undermine the legitimacy of the Republic. So it doesn't matter how anybody feels about Louis XVI, or what kind of monarch he actually was.
For the Republic to succeed, the cord must be cut clean. You cannot sympathise in any respect with the previous system; it must be guilty on all charges. This was the justification for killing Louis XVI: The division, the move from one reality to another, must be whole and complete. So in the first act of blood magic, the monarch is killed to symbolically kill monarchs, and slice the legacy of monarchy away from the country's spirit and future fortunes.
But what about Marie Antoinette?
They have a problem with Marie Antoinette. She's 33, and already dying; it's suspected she had ovarian cancer during this time. In prison she's bleeding constantly, and prematurely ageing. She can barely walk. Lots of people think she should just be sent off to a nunnery, or exiled. These are all reasonable considerations.
It's true that for a long time, MA was a fun and flashy fashionista. But once she had kids, being a mom was all she wanted to do. She didn't want to entertain court, go shopping, do pomp and circumstance; she wanted to hang out in muslin dresses and breastfeed. While this would probably fly today, at the time it was considered unbecoming for a queen.
What's more, Louis XVI never took a mistress; he was faithful for his whole marriage. This was a political issue; mistresses played a critical role in the king's ear. They influenced policy, so the role was practically considered a cabinet job. (That's why Madame Du Barry, the mistress of Louis's granddad, was such a pill.)
If the mistress position is open, then presumably Marie Antoinette is fulfilling both roles: That of wife (which she's fucking up, because she had kids and doesn't want to show up to state functions anymore), and of mistress, an influential voice in policy. Unfortunately, even when pressed by her family, all her feeble attempts to weigh in on policy fall flat.
Nobody cares. Whenever people in France get mad about a decision, they put it all on the Queen: Her excesses, her failure to fulfil her duties, and her ostensible impositions in policymaking—which is inappropriate, because that's what a mistress does. And if Louis XVI doesn't have a mistress, that's all the more proof how influential she is, non?
Before things really go to shit for the monarchy, Marie Antoinette actually works hard to make the life she wants into a new kind of role. She wants to be seen as the mother of the country, so she can be permitted to just hang out and be a mom. Sometimes this works, but most of the time it doesn't.
Let's return to her trial. The decision is made to kill her well before it begins. But the men in power can't kill MA for the same reason they've killed Louis XVI, because that would suggest a queen is equally as important as a king. That's not part of the French monarchial belief system; what is this, England?! Gross.
So they instead attack where she's vulnerable: This notion of her as "mother" of the nation. What's the most heinous thing a mother can do?
Incest.
They separate her from her 7-year-old son. They beat him, get him drunk, play with him, just generally fuck with him—all within earshot of his mother, in a dungeon nearby (two tortures in one!). And they give him a story to tell. When Marie-Antoinette appears on trial, her son—dressed as a mini revolutionary and egged on by his new adult male friends—claims he was repeatedly molested by his mom and aunt.
It's disgusting, terrible stuff, torn right out of speculative tabloids whose misogynist, xenophobic invective haunted MA's steps for the entirety of her reign.
You know, I get Harry's trauma about the tabloids. A case can be made that they killed Marie Antoinette, too.
(In letters to family members and loved ones, MA asks them to forgive her son for these "confessions." "You know how easy it is to get a child to say what you want," she tells them. My heart aches for her. Nobody will have time to forgive him; her baby will die, isolated and starved, months after her. The new order was never going to keep a dauphin alive.)
Marie-Antoinette is tried and found guilty of incest: She has corrupted the role of mother in the most intimate way. When asked how she pleads, she says nothing; when prompted further, finally says something to the effect of, "Every mother here knows there can be no response to an accusation against which nature recoils."
A lot of the women in the room, who were not on her side, are moved. They almost start to defend her. Sensing they might lose control of the situation, the men immediately charge MA guilty, and hustle her out to await death.
Why? Why did they need to kill her?
In documentation and correspondence around that time, the case made is this: Nobody whose opinion mattered really felt Marie Antoinette deserved to die, though they allowed that belief to proliferate publicly. This sensibility is doubled once the king is killed; he is the embodiment of monarchy, and she is not.
A blood sacrifice was already made to separate Republic from Monarchy. But to avoid the Republic meeting the monarchy's fate, to ensure its viability, it must be intimately wedded to its people. One of the best ways to do this is with shared complicity.
In essence, Marie Antoinette has to die because her death bathes the hands of Republic leaders and ratifiers, and the everyday citizens of France, in the same blood. Whether she merits dying is sufficiently murky a question that there is a tint of guilt, of judicial doubt, to this act—one everyone can share in. We buried and abused the body together. Now we are bound.
Why am I talking about this?
Because what is happening with Palestine is driving me crazy. I don't want to fall too deep down the rabbit hole of social media, or join others on high horses. But watching this situation unspool makes me feel itchy with dis-ease, a sense of insanity that feels contagious.
Of course people have the right to mourn what Hamas did. But also, of course we have the right to be alarmed, appalled, and frightened by what the Israeli government is currently doing to what remains of the Palestinian people. I don't know how you can see something like this and still try making the case that mourning genocide in plain sight is an anti-Semitic act.
Yet those are easy arguments to make, because they're officially sanctioned. I'm not just talking about the propaganda machine at work in the west. I'm talking about the United States' overwhelming military support to Israel in helping decimate an "enemy" that has no military of its own, that lives in what is commonly acknowledged to be an open-air prison.
I'm also talking about how, in France, marches in support of Palestine are actively, violently suppressed. All this happens in complicity with media, which advances one narrative—that of Hamas' victims—versus another: In the handful of days since Hamas attacked Israel, the latter has decimated their death toll, levelling whole apartment buildings, wiping out Palestinian families at the root. Celebrities have mistakenly posted photos of Gaza, or dying Palestinian children, believing them to be of Israel and Israelis. If they are later alarmed by the reality of their mistakes, it's not obvious; the posts are merely deleted, or sometimes replaced with the ol' "no children should die on any side" argument (I'm looking at you, Jamie Lee Curtis).
Meanwhile, the invective on social media intensifies. It should be easy to pick a side, comes one set of voices, before advancing the side that is so obviously the right one. Your silence is complicity, say others—as if the energy we've all wasted screaming at each other on these fucking platforms has benefited anyone, or anything, besides the platforms.
Some people have genuinely terrible takes that make me shudder. They feel dangerous, scary and myopic. I'm sickened by how we've come to conflate posts with action, Likes with impact.
The problem is, we're all going to waste our time and our lives arguing like this, about any number of things from Covid to climate—to no deeper purpose—because we are all complicit. And if we were to stop for a second, step back, and look at the broader picture, we would finally see it.
Lots of forces don't want us to do that; they invest in keeping us from doing that. But also, why would we want to?
It's not our fault. The vast majority of us fuelling this bonkers rage machine live in the heavily-armed, wealthy countries who 1) have an economic interest in ongoing instability in the Middle East, 2) have an ideological interest in continuing to support this colony, in part because they created it to assuage their own guilt (another act of magic!), and also because we are violently-held colonies ourselves, and 3) for all these reasons, must convince people that these issues are not about atrocity. It's about what's moral, what's right. Our countries—who just want democracy for everyone (even as we have suppressed Palestine's attempts to erect one, repeatedly)—are always on the side of right, because we tacitly, lazily equate democracy with freedom.
This is a lot to take in. Let me try to make this simpler:
Everything we think we understand about civilisation and progress is informed by violent subjugation. We subjugate others and we subjugate space and resources. In order to sustain itself, the systems we are part of must do this repeatedly, refreshing subjugations and finding new victims in order to continue enriching particular groups.
This is not the only way humans have ever lived. We fool ourselves by believing this is somehow a defining characteristic of human nature, or inevitable once human cultures scale to a certain size. It wasn't inevitable. Most of the world's cultures resisted European colonisation, and were forced to comply by the barrels of guns. Now the systems binding us are so large and pervasive that they easily sustain themselves (basic systems theory), because justifications for their existence feel like common sense.
This is just what people do. Fuck all the way off. It's one thing people do. It's not what all people do, or what people inevitably do.
Still, we are complicit in every aspect of these systems of subjugation. The same countries that most loudly condemn human trafficking and slavery, for example, profit most, and consume the most, from countries that traffic and enslave. Our technology, clothing, food—basically all our consumption habits—make us complicit in those blood sacrifices.
It is very easy for some people, online, to say that silence is complicity. But that doesn't make allowances for the reasons people might have to speak, or to stay silent. Some are losing jobs or getting shadowbanned for supporting Palestinians' right to exist. And all this gets swept up in the (legitimate) anxiety many Jewish people have that their pain, which is historical, repeatedly triggered, and often evoked in popular culture, is considered less real than other people's.
This bullying in the direction of one correct opinion isn't happening in a vacuum; think of Colin Kaepernick kneeling, or President Obama being accused of evoking the "race card" when he mourned the death of Trayvon Martin, or how Americans were asked to choose between livelihood and health—for themselves and others—during the most intense period of Covid, when most of the world was confined.
My family are from a country that was colonised multiple times. The US came to "help" liberate us; once we won, and while still exhausted from those wars, it announced it had purchased us. Filipinos resisted with the very last of their efforts and finally were able to drive the US out, sort of ... under the condition that we mount a democracy they approve of.
The Philippines, its interests and its autonomy, has been compromised by American interests ever since.
This is the story of a lot of countries. But it is also the story of us, living in the west, individually. We are encouraged to consume to "help" our economies, then we're told global warming is our fault, our issue to solve by recycling, reducing, reusing; the conglomerates truly responsible for mass-scale resource extraction and pollution get tax breaks and go on producing more than we may ever wish to consume. Whole deserts are covered with clothes we never thought to buy, things nobody wants. Unsustainable objects are cheaper than sustainable ones; the "choice" to be sustainable is considered a luxury.
How is this our fault?
The bottom line is, we're not free—either to speak or stay silent. All possible positions are compromised because we are embedded in these systems to live. Like the citizens of France, collectively bloodied by the death of Marie Antoinette, we are complicit in the violations of our governments, which operate at the behest of the international market system, which never, ever existed to enrich people locally. It was exploitative from its very inception, bathed in blood once we started killing indigenous peoples for minerals to ship back.
Local, poor Europeans became complicit in this system even as it subjugated them: Their right to farm was stripped, based on the false case that land privatisation, with harvests nourishing international needs instead of local ones, produces less waste. People suddenly found themselves unable to produce and consume their own food, and this remains the case today, particularly for meat. They were instead made to buy it, and ideally to become merchants themselves. Exploitation and desperation trickled downward. (Women launched food strikes. Guess what followed? Witch hunts. This is an oversimplification, but you get the drift now, I think.)
In modern times, our complicity deepens because we have really good incentives to hedge our bets. Survival is getting harder for more and more people. We have families to think about, expensive colleges to pay for. We want to keep jobs to keep roofs over our heads. Food is getting pricier, as is transport. Don't even talk to me about healthcare or retirement.
All these variables compromise our capacity to do a bigger good if it ever invites conflict with the fluid motion of those variables. So we, in turn, engage in compromised medium goods: We can post on social media (the positions have to be correct, somehow both deeply emotive and carefully considered for their potential impact on the poster). We can start a B-corp, run workshops about "conscious capitalism." We keep our hands busy. The blood never washes off.
In the late days of the Aztec people, human sacrifice was almost unceasing, anxiety-driven: A way to advance empire while terrifying enemies while keeping people in line, culpable, fêting Huītzilōpōchtli—the sun god, who required constant sacrifices to defeat the night—in frenzies of grief, terror and ecstasy.
That's where we're at now. Rome is burning, the tired saying goes. We're in climate crisis, having clocked the hottest summer ever, and news articles actually have the gall to print things like "humans can withstand more heat than previously believed!" We are not done with what remains an ongoing pandemic. Millions of people have begun to migrate as the result of climate issues—mostly to countries that caused them, but who refuse to take responsibility for climate refugees dying by land and sea. We've watched the progressive genocide in Palestine for decades and are told it is not okay to sympathise; Ukraine, however, remains a priority (though Ukrainian refugees of colour have been stopped at European borders, even as their white counterparts are cleared to advance).
It's a frenzied, sick dance at the foot of a great altar, and we are all awash in blood. We cannot ever blame anyone without blaming ourselves—but also, this is how the systems we engage with were designed. As Gordon White said in a recent ep of Rune Soup, "All the water is poisoned."
With our survival tied to violence, how can we combat the latter in good conscience? We can't. We have to find excuses that absolve us, that "logic" ugliness: It's human nature, these are ancient conflicts, capitalism is the best way to reward creativity, testosterone yields aggression, God made us stewards of all creatures, this is what progress looks like ... Take your pick for the fight in question.
We will never fight for the right things unless we first square with the reality of our own entangled relationships, and how difficult it is to extract ourselves without losing things we love. I think we have to mourn this—in our desire to protect some things, other, treasured parts of us have been maimed. If we can learn how to mourn this, properly and together, maybe we can start to see clear. Maybe we can get braver, because we know we have support from quarters unexpected.
Maybe we can starve the correct enemy, not each other or ourselves.
There's a reason why blood magic is the most vilified form of magic. It goes straight to what gives us life; it is the deepest magic to engage in, the hardest to undo. But the egregores such magic feeds require continuous sating. As they get hungrier, the returns they offer grow thinner. (This is, like, the entire premise of "Cabin in the Woods.")
What if we just ... stopped? But we can't if we refuse to acknowledge they are there, that we feed them, that we are scared of finding out what happens if we stop.
This, too, is part of their power: The delusional belief that we've left all this behind—the tearing-out of hearts and rolling-down of inert bodies to protect our fortunes, nourish our crops—that we're rational societies that make rational choices.
Not all gods thrive by naming. The ones we feed thrive in the shadows of belief, their contours sharp in the negative space. If we can't or won't see them, how can any of us be made free?
If we closed our eyes for just a second, took a breath and stepped away from our pressure cookers, we could keenly feel how free we are not. We would begin sensing all the ties that bind. We need to find what's on the other side of those threads.
