Tea at Trianon: The Birth of France

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

Sunday, March 2, 2008

The Birth of France

From Laudem Gloriae.

On Christmas Day, 496, surrounded by great pomp, St. Remigius, bishop of Reims, baptized the king: Bow thy head, O Sicambrian; adore what thou hast burned and burn what thou hast adored. Clovis’s sister and 3,000 soldiers also embraced Christ.

According to one pious tradition, the baptismal chrism was miraculously brought in a vase by a dove; the Sainte Ampoule rests in the Reims Cathedral, traditional site of the coronation of French monarchs, their heads anointed with the chrism from that sacred vessel.

Clovis made Paris the capital of his kingdom. By law, Romans and barbarians were made perfectly equal, and the Salic Law was written down. He also protected and defended Holy Mother Church, and is attributed with establishing churches and monasteries all throughout his kingdom, St. Geneviève being one of them, where his remains were laid to rest until the period of the Revolution; a band of Jacobins vandalized his tomb, scattered his ashes, and wrecked the sanctuary.

His Latinized name Ludovicus evolved into the French Louis, a name that would be significant among many later French kings, and immortalized in the holy life of King St. Louis IX.