Tea at Trianon: Plus catholique que le Pape

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

Monday, October 8, 2007

Plus catholique que le Pape

Some interesting reflections on the French political thinker Charles Maurras and Action Française.

But in the end it became apparent that Maurras, who might have been the most revered literary figure in France of his generation, and his almost equally brilliant collaborators Léon Daudet and Jacques Bainville were demonstrable neopagans and philosophical skeptics. The ax fell on them on December 20, 1926, when Pope Pius XI issued an admonition to French Catholics “to keep their distance from Action Française."

Anonymous said...: Again and again France is the breeding ground of intellectuals that are bent on destroying anything the pertains to Godliness by masking their attempts in so called heroic virtues.; October 8, 2007 at 1:52:00 PM EDT