Tea at Trianon: The Battle of Algiers

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, May 4, 2007

The Battle of Algiers

Scott McConnell in a recent issue of The American Conservative examines the many parallels between the present conflict in Iraq and the Algerian war fifty years ago.

What lessons might Americans draw from the Algerian war? They are not obvious. The brutal conflict, which gave rise to an extraordinary memoir literature in French, impinged on France’s national life far more than Iraq has yet touched America. But some common features are clear. The Algerian war was more or less part of our own historic era, influenced by international air travel and mass communications. A Western democracy was facing off against Arab Muslims; terrorism against civilians—first employed by the Arab guerrillas and later by the French far Right—was a central aspect of the war; and the use of torture to root out the terror networks produced a moral upheaval in France. Indeed, the war very nearly cost France its democracy. Share