Louis XVI, King of France and Navarre.
On June 5, 1775, Louis XVI left Versailles, accompanied by the queen, Monsieur, Madame, and the Comte d’Artois, on his way to Compiègne, where he arrived at ten o’clock in the evening. On the 8th he left Compiègne to sleep at Fismes; on the 9th he took the road to Rheims. He went there to receive the benediction of his crown, and the solemn consecration of the title, which he held from his ancestors, and the visible sign of that grace of God in the name of which he reigned. The coronation was, in France, a national tradition; the people found in the oaths which the monarch took a recognition of his rights; and if certain philosophers like D’Alembert and Condorcet, carried away by their skeptical passions, only saw in it “a bizarre and absurd ceremony,” entailing “the most useless as well as the most ridiculous of useless expenditures.”
The Life of Marie Antoinette; Translated from the French By Maxime de La Rocheterie · 1893, Chapter XI, Pg.127
Short Stories on Honor, Chivalry, and the World of Nobility—no. 830
