Tea at Trianon: What You Are Not Supposed to Know

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

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

What You Are Not Supposed to Know

Thomas E.Woods has an excellent book review on Kevin Gutzman's The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution. Here is an excerpt:

Now there will always be some libertarians who – missing the point – will insist that they do not care about the Constitution, and by extension about a groundbreaking book like this. All they care about is liberty, regardless of the words of any Constitution, which they do not consider binding anyway.

My purpose is not to disparage this point of view, which in large measure I myself share. I simply happen to find it significant that from the very beginning, politicians and judges, in order to justify their departure from the understanding of the Constitution that was peddled to the people at ratification time, employed arguments that were exactly the opposite of what they themselves had told Americans in order to get them to ratify the Constitution. This is obviously an important proselytizing point for libertarians, since it shows how governments and their "constitutions" really end up working. Gutzman’s book also provides a fascinating glimpse at how the state transforms institutional restraints on its growth into mandates for that growth. (Bertrand de Jouvenel did something similar for European history in his book On Power.) And it asks, if only implicitly, whether in the long run any piece of paper can really be a match for the state’s predatory instincts. I can hardly imagine a libertarian or a serious conservative who wouldn’t find these questions worth asking.