Tea at Trianon: Margaret Sanger's Despair

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

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Margaret Sanger's Despair

Another revealing article from the archives of the NOR.

Toward the end of her life, she confessed that she had long ago "entrusted her spirit" to the Rosicrucian Society, yet she seemed to know little about the Society. In 1951, when she was in her 70s, she enrolled in a Rosicrucian mail-order course to learn more. From that course she became convinced that she would not die because, as her biographer reports, she saw that she "embodied the aspirations of all women on earth" and was "their chosen agent of liberation." Evidently, the Rosicrucians were not in the business of teaching humility! In 1954 she said in an interview that she liked the Rosicrucians "because of their interest in the enhanced spiritual powers of women and their sympathy for political feminism." In this fake spirituality she found fleeting compensation for the brutal emptiness of her scientific materialism.

Anonymous said...: Thanks for this interesting article. I wish I could understand why she's considered "great" because she doesn't deserve it.; January 16, 2008 at 11:06:00 AM EST
elena maria vidal said...: No she doesn't.; January 16, 2008 at 1:05:00 PM EST
Anonymous said...: I read the whole article. She had a disgusting character.; January 17, 2008 at 9:58:00 AM EST
elena maria vidal said...: Indeed. Yet such a person has shaped our world.....; January 17, 2008 at 10:06:00 AM EST