And therefore must to be said.

I suppose.

i agree

I have some very gruesome eye witness accounts of how Mme de Lamballe met her death, if you have the stomach for them?

Yes, Baron! I like the gory details - do tell!

Me too. But maybe you should PM us the details because some other members wouldn't want to read such details.

hmm, information?
Do tell, Just add a warning, then hit enter a couple times.
Then let us read, s'il vous plait.

I am quite interested in hearing those.
Could you write them for us cher baron?

My take on Louise Lamballe is that she was the bosom friend of MA ... perhaps the Dauphine's best friend in those early years.... but in the year 1775 MA met Gabrielle Polignac.
Gabrielle was altogether different, she was stylish, independent... she was nt impressed by Royalty
and she wasnt fawning.... like so many women at court.

Gabrielle became MA's soul mate, a friend and companion the Queen wanted near her every day.
Poor Louise just could nt compete....
In the novel "Emma"... Louise would be "Miss Woodhouse"... pleasant and friendly.. but in the end
boring and lightweight.... not the candidate for a high society marriage that Emma first thought she was.

As the situation in Paris grew dark and ominous Gabrielle Polignac left Paris and the Queen for exile in Switzerland while the ever faithful Louise Lamballe returned to the Queen's household when she could so easily have escaped to the provinces herself.

The reward for her faithfulness and her steadfast friendship was to be attacked in the streets of Paris by a bloodthirsty mob and cruelly killed.

Not exactly.

She was one of a very large number of prisoners killed during the ghastly September massacres:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_Massacres

The basic story is that, when her turn came for a "trial", she refused to renounce the Queen and was sent to the side where it was understood people would be stabbed to death. In her case, her body was mutilated, at the very least by having her head cut off, coiffed and paraded around Paris. One man was accused of having put her genitalia on a pike as well and carrying those around Paris (he denied it, when things calmed down and the Revolutionary government, rather hypocritically, began to seek out the "culprits" of something that had been implicitly encouraged.) Some say too she was raped.

It's important to point out that most of the victims of these massacres were in fact commoners, even very poor. Apparently several prostitutes were tortured before being killed. At one point the Wikipedia entry said it was mainly priests and aristocrats who were killed, which shows how some people try to deflect criticism of these slaughters by somehow presenting them as an uprising against oppressors.

They were in fact one of the crudest paroxysms of mob violence in modern history.

Its interesting too that most of this horrific violence and slaughter really
began when the mobs from Marseilles arrived during that hot August of 1792
They must have been an army..... like an army of cut-throats.
Of course the Prussians threatening to invade and take retribution on the Parisians if the Royal family
were harmed.... was also upping the temperature.

Prussia had joined the war against France in May, and, on August 23, 1792, the Prussians captured Longwy, just inside France and south of the Austrian Netherlands border.
On September 2 the Prussians captured Verdun, 50 kilometers to the southwest.
Rumors spread that nobles and priests were plotting with the invaders.
Parisians went on a five-day rampage, to monasteries and from prison to prison, killing political prisoners, priests and nobles, as they went.
And the dead were counted at around 1,500.

Killing prisoners, period. There was an idea of purification mixed in with all this. Petty thieves, not political in the least and many very young, were killed.

Much of this, some say, was incited in the press, so it wasn't just a matter of spontaneous fear or panic.

Imbert de Saint Amand - Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty” (1891)

On the September massacres: Page 350
The register of the little Force , which is preserved in the archives of the prefecture of police, records that at the time of the September massacres, this prison in which the Princess de Lamballe was immured, contained one hundred and ten women, most of them not concerned with political affairs, and in great part women of the town. (Prostitutes)

Page 367- 68
There was a woman, known on account of her charms as The Beautiful Flowergirl”, who was accused of having wounded her lover, a French guard, in a fit of jealousy…… they fastened her naked to a post, her legs spread apart and her feet nailed to the ground. They burned her alive. They cut off her breasts with sabre strokes. They impaled her on a hot iron. Her shrieks carried dismay as far as the outer banks of the Seine.

Page 368
At the Salpetriere there was another spectacle. The prison for fallen women is a place of correction for the old, of amendment for the young, and an asylum for those who are still children. More than forty children of the lower classes were slain during these horrible days.

This is horrible.
Yes, the September massacres were one of the darkest days of the revolution, and the sad thing is, many people don't know about them because they're not so famous as other episodes during the Revolution. But I think they should be known, because they're an example of what can be the consequence of encouraging uncontrolled mob violence.
I think that, in those days, a mix of different destructive forces was at work, not least the idea of a "moral" regeneration (the purification that Jimcheval mentioned) that had to be obtained through blood spilling. I think the moral, even puritan aspect is, in general, a very important feature of the Revolution, and it led to many of the worst episodes: hate towards the victim, which led to their dishumanization, was fostered by their being seen as "immoral", may they be aristocrats, priests felt as corrupted, or, as you said, prostitutes.
I think this is a general aspect of the Revolution, that in some cases (as the september massacres) could be stretched to an extreme, but that was more or less always present: if you think of it, also Marie Antoinette, before being killed, was transformed by pamplhets in an immoral, almost inhuman being, who deserved no pity. This is mybe the reason for the insistence on her alleged sexual extravagance.
I think it's terrible when people feel so morally superior to others, that they don't admit any pity for them: this is the beginning of the most awful slaughters, and the serach for a so called "purity" is many times the reason for attacking the weakest members of society (prostitutes are the perfect target for this).