Augustinian Traces in Louis XVI

 

There is some amazing new scholarship about Louis XVI. Here is a paper about Louis XVI's spirituality as formed by his education, which influenced his future actions. From Dr. Philip Diaz-Lewis via the History of European Ideas:

This article argues that Louis XVI’s student notes, the Réflexions sur mes Entretiens avec M. le duc de la Vauguyon reveal a coherent Augustinian Platonist ethics derived from Fénelon, in which humanité functions as a divine exemplar idea through which moral principles are known and royal virtues specified. Against existing interpretations that oppose Louis’s reformism to his attachment to sacral monarchy, it proposes that the same philosophical framework can be used to interpret both his constitutional initiatives and his maintenance of traditional court ritual. The argument proceeds by reconstructing the Dauphin’s formation under La Vauguyon, Moreau, and Berthier, then by a close reading of key Réflexions passages on God, natural law and humanité, interpreted with the aid of the Dictionnaire de Trévoux lexicon. (Read more.)

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The US Should Exit the UN

 From Brownstone Insights:

The UN is often viewed as an ineffectual bureaucracy that occasionally does some good. It is nothing so benevolent. Its origins may have been well-meaning, but the current UN has become what it claims to oppose. The US should leave the UN altogether and immediately, especially since its unjust policies are likely to get worse…and soon.

The UN’s Original Mission

The UN Charter (1945) opens,

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED…to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women…

The Preamble of its Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) states,

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Article 2 of the Declaration provides,

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex…

‘All human beings are equal’ is the basis of Western justice, whether the equality is under nature, God, or law. Instead of pursuing equality, however, the UN is now a woke and corrupt actor that creates inequality and division. The UN’s financial malfeasance, the sexual abuse by field personnel, its demonization of the West…are well documented in the 104-page report From Watchdogs to Ideologues: How Politicized UN Rapporteurs Are Subverting Human Rights by the Geneva-based NGO UN Watch.

The UN’s demonstrated commitment is to social justice or a wokeness rooted in equity, not equality. Equity seeks the redistribution of wealth and power to those who are considered oppressed from those who are considered oppressors. Equity is the opposite of equality under the law. (Read more.)

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Does King Priam of Troy Appear in Hittite Records?

 From The Greek Reporter:

King Priam was the famous king of Troy during the Trojan War. It was his son, Paris Alexander, who took Helen back to Troy and inadvertently caused the enormous war with the Greeks. Priam himself was allegedly a powerful monarch. He was married to a princess from the nearby kingdom of Phrygia, which itself was a very wealthy and powerful kingdom.

The father of Priam was Laomedon, the king who had fortified the city of Troy. He was the last king in a dynasty going all the way back to Dardanus, some five generations prior to him. While many of the kings in this line had Greek names, scholars generally interpret Priam’s name to be Luwian. This was an Anatolian language common in the Bronze Age.

Traditionally, scholars believe Priam first appears in Homer’s Iliad. However, some researchers claim he appears in records, such as those of the Hittites, long before this.

What are the records in question? They are Hittite documents dating to the 13th century BCE, particularly the middle and late part of that century. These documents reveal that a certain war leader named Piyama-Radu was active in Western Anatolia in that era. (Read more.)

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Bastille Day and the French Revolution Were Not Caused by Marie-Antoinette

From The New American:

July 14 marks another anniversary of Bastille Day, the day the Paris mob rioted and stormed the Bastille, a prison fortress in the city. The popular image of the incident is that of the French Revolution itself, which is that the liberty-loving French folk in Paris spontaneously rose up against a tyrannical king and his arrogant wife, and heroically stormed the symbol of the Old Regime — liberating hundreds of political prisoners. This led to an abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a government dedicated to liberty for all the people of France.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Almost everyone has heard that Queen Marie Antoinette said, “Let them eat cake,” in haughty response to the plea of the poor starving masses of France: “We have no bread.”

That is also untrue.

And it is widely believed that Antoinette caused or at least was the principal cause — of the entire French Revolution.

That is ridiculous.

Whereas Louis XVI and his wife, Marie, are usually pictured in the history books and in the popular culture as tyrants of the worst sort, the truth is quite different. The real Marie Antoinette was a charitable woman, who lodged and fed 12 poor families, at her own expense, at Trianon. She founded the Society of Ladies of Maternal Charity. She even once stopped her carriage for over an hour to aid an injured person, waiting until a surgeon was located.

Historian Antonia Fraser disputed the cruel libel in her book Marie Antoinette, the Journey. “As a handy journalistic cliché, [“Let them eat cake”] it may never die,” Fraser wrote, adding “such ignorant behavior would have been quite out of character. The unfashionably philanthropic Marie Antoinette would have been far more likely to bestow her own cake impulsively upon the starving people before her.”

If the Revolution was not caused by Marie Antoinette, then just who did cause it? (Read more.)

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Climate Policy as National Suicide

 From The Enterprise:

There is a simple test for whether a nation’s climate policy is serious. Ask what it does for the citizen standing in a 104°F apartment. Britain fails this test, and it fails it in a way that should terrify anyone watching Sacramento or Albany, because the failure is not an accident of implementation. It is baked into the theory. Britain has organized its entire climate regime around a single false premise, the premise that a country can purchase safety from a warming world by making itself poorer. The results are now in, and they constitute the most instructive policy experiment of the century.

Begin with the arithmetic, because everything else follows from it. In 2024 the world emitted 53.2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases. Britain emitted 386.7 million tonnes, which is 0.73% of the total. China emitted roughly 40 Britains. The US emitted about 15. India emitted 11. And here is the number that should end every debate about unilateral sacrifice: global emissions grew by roughly 665 million tonnes in that single year, which means the world added approximately 1.7 Britains of new emissions in 12 months. If Britain had vanished from the map on January 1, 2024, ceased all economic activity, extinguished every light and grounded every aircraft, the global emissions ledger would have recovered the difference in about 7 months. This is not an argument for nihilism. It is an argument for strategic clarity. Britain cannot control the hazard. It can only control its vulnerability to the hazard. A rational government would therefore ask one question above all others: what reduces the vulnerability of the British people? The answer is adaptation, and adaptation has a price tag. The Climate Change Committee, Britain’s own official climate watchdog, estimates that the country needs approximately £11 billion annually in adaptation investment, covering flood defenses, water storage, hospital retrofits, and cooling. Note what that number implies. Adaptation is not a moral posture. It is a capital expenditure, and capital expenditures require capital, which requires a productive economy, which requires cheap and reliable energy.

Now observe what Britain actually did. The Office for National Statistics reports that output in Britain’s energy-intensive industries has fallen by roughly one-third since 2021. Non-domestic electricity prices nearly doubled between early 2021 and late 2023. By 2023, British industrial electricity prices were the highest among all 24 countries reporting to the International Energy Agency, nearly 50% above French and German levels and approximately 4 times American and Canadian levels. Think about what that sentence means. The country that needs £11 billion a year to protect itself from heat and flooding has engineered the most expensive industrial electricity in the developed world, driving out the very industries whose tax revenue and productive capacity would fund the protection. Britain is not trading prosperity for safety. It is liquidating the capital account that safety would have been drawn against. (Read more.)

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The Shot Heard ‘Round the World

 From Gettysburg Connection:

By the mid-1700s, the ideas of the Enlightenment – social contract, natural rights, freedom of speech, religious toleration – had been in circulation for nearly 100 years. But the Declaration of Independence was the first time these thoughts had been translated into action. Within a few months of its adoption by the Continental Congress, the Declaration had spread throughout Europe. In Spanish-America, publication and circulation of the Declaration and other revolutionary documents was banned, but it was still translated into Spanish and continued to spread.

Veterans of the Revolution also spread the word. Tadeusz Kosciusko is a national hero in Poland for his efforts to promote human liberties and the end of feudal practices in that country. With the help of America’s ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was eventually approved by the French National Assembly and King Louis XVI. The two “Declarations” were read throughout the world and inspired independence movements. (Read more.)

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Chesterton on St. Joan

 

From Rae at Educating Souls:

Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We know that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow. Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing. — G.K. Chesterton

(Illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith)

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The 400,000 USAID Deaths

 From DataRepublican:

South Sudan’s independence was the product of a twenty-year American political project that united four constituencies who agreed on nothing else. Evangelicals found Christians enslaved by an Islamist government; Francis Bok, captured at age seven, became the first formerly enslaved person to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Congressional Black Caucus found Arab militias enslaving Black Africans; the apartheid divestment playbook was redeployed against Talisman Energy, the last major Western oil company in Sudan. Neoconservatives found a state sponsor of terrorism that had hosted bin Laden. Liberal interventionists found a genocide in Darfur; the Save Darfur rally on the National Mall in 2006 drew tens of thousands of people.

The Darfur Peace and Accountability Act passed the House 416 to 3. All four constituencies arrived at the same policy: pressure Khartoum, support the south, self-determination. The Save Darfur Coalition merged in 2011 — referendum year — into “United to End Genocide”. The momentum from one crisis was redirected to engineer the independence of a different part of the country.

Meanwhile, Operation Lifeline Sudan had been running since 1989 — sixteen years of airstrips, supply chains, and NGO networks that USAID inherited. OLS was the first time the UN negotiated directly with a non-state armed group, implicitly legitimizing the SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army) as a governing authority before it governed anything. (Read more.)

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Did Medieval Women Have Power?

 From History...the Interesting Bits:

Another way women could exert power and influence was in the arena of war. Aethelflaed, daughter of King Alfred the Great, ruled the kingdom of Mercia throughout her husband’s illness and then as a ruler in her own right after he died in 911. Alongside her brother, Edward the Elder, Aethelflaed halted the attacks of the Vikings and even reclaimed much territory lost to them in the previous generations. Aethelflaed can be found directly participating in warfare, fulfilling the role of a commander.

Later examples of the involvement of women in warfare can be found on the Continent. Matilda of Tuscany raised and led armies in her struggle to secure her inheritance. The mighty Holy Roman Emperor proved no match for Matilda, and he was forced to relinquish his claims to Matilda’s Italian domains in the late eleventh century. Sikelgaita, the wife of the Southern Italian Norman ruler, Robert Guiscard, earned a reputation equally formidable as that of her husband. No mere passive consort to a powerful Norman baron, Sikelgaita lent authority to her husband’s power in the region through her lineage. Guiscard trusted Sikelgaita as a military commander and is perhaps best remembered for her orders to the fleeing soldiers of her husband’s army, whereby she challenged them to fight and ‘be men’. Born in the early fifteenth century, Joan of Arc is one of the most famous examples of a medieval woman participating in warfare. From humble origins, Joan followed what she believed to be spiritual voices, which led her all the way to the French court. Joan proved to be a valuable asset to the French Dauphin, achieving a series of military victories over the English and even securing his coronation before finding herself discarded by the monarch once her usefulness had run its course. Some women found power and even fame through their military activities and accomplishments, with women such as Joan of Arc continuing to intrigue modern audiences. (Read more.)

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