Tea at Trianon: Revolution and Total War

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, August 17, 2007

Revolution and Total War

More on David Bell's book. (Via LRC) To quote:

Within weeks, France was pitted against most of Europe. Even Robespierre came on board, now on his way to becoming the architect of the Terror. War was imagined as bringing about, in Bell's words, "an extraordinary break in human history". With it came delusional fantasies of romantic self-expression that condemned hundreds of thousands to grisly ends. Bell cites the military engineer Lazare Carnot declaring to a soldier who had lost his face: "None of us would refuse glory at the price it cost you." Although the French deputies balked at killing the British prime minister, they called for the extermination of his subjects. Total war, as opposed to "limited" war, was born; it was now in the hands of glacial types like Saint-Just, whose savage methods, coupled with France's demographic advantage, led to the republic's astonishing string of victories. In 1793, when the Catholic and royalist Vendée area rose up in internal rebellion, the republic's response was certainly total: an estimated 250,000 men, women and children perished "out of a principle of humanity", as General Carrier put it during the mass drownings at Nantes. The "hell columns" anticipated the SS by a century and a half, yet Bell points out that the names of some of the worst butchers still adorn the Arc de Triomphe: like Vichy or Algeria, the Vendée remains an awkward cyst in the national psyche. For Bell, it is the place where total war "was first revealed to its full, gruesome extent". Share