Tea at Trianon: A History of Political Trials

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, June 2, 2008

A History of Political Trials

John Laughland examines the past and the present.

Various conclusions emerge from the historical account. The first is that, in three hundred years of trials of former heads of state and government, there has never been a single acquittal. The only former heads of state who have escaped conviction have been Erich Honecker, the former head of state of East Germany, and Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president – the former by being about to die, the latter by actually dying while still on trial. The grim words of Danton to a French exile who returned from London to Paris in 1792 to help the defence of Louis XVI have been proved right: “Can one help a king who is on trial? He is dead as soon as he appears before his judges.”