Death by Volcano: Revolutionary Theatre and Marie-Antoinette

This paper compares the trial and execution of Marie-Antoinette on 16 October 1793 with the performance, two days later, of Sylvain Maréchal’s hit play Le Jugement dernier des rois, which staged the death of all of Europe’s monarchs by an exploding volcano. What links them is the revolutionary concept of rupture, in which the historical breach with the past, associated with the death of the king, was to have established a new temporal relation between events. This article contends that the continued existence of the queen after the symbolic act of regicide and the official beginning of a new time reflects a profound crisis in the revolutionary self-image, a crisis fictively resolved by Maréchal’s utopian depiction of a world-historical revolution in which all of Europe’s monarchs are naturally extinguished. For the volcano shows how revolutionary history requires the supplement of a symbolic terror in order to reintegrate events within a linear history of progress. By contextualizing the queen’s trial within its own present, when revolutionary history was being actively constructed, this article aims to shed new light on the relation between revolutionary violence and the experience of time.