Tea at Trianon: Barefoot in the Snow

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, September 3, 2008

Barefoot in the Snow

Matilda of Canossa and the stand-off with Henry IV. (Via Joshua Snyder)

Canossa was simply one episode in a centuries-long journey strewn with victories and defeats. Gregory VII himself soon experienced the emperor's vengeance. Stripped of power, replaced by an antipope, and forced to flee, he died in exile in Salerno in 1085. But by this time, the principle for which Pope Gregory and Matilda fought had entered into history. The Church's autonomy from political power was asserted gradually and painstakingly, but irreversibly, despite the recurring waves of caesaropapism, fundamentalism, and anticlericalism, becoming one of the main pillars of modern Western civilization.