Tea at Trianon: The American Myth

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, December 8, 2008

The American Myth

Here is the latest from cousin John Laughland.

We can see this in the way Americans often refer to their state as “young”. In reality, the American state is no younger than other states which never refer to themselves in the same way, Australia or Canada for instance. The reason for the difference is that Americans believe their country represents and new and different kind of society, created ex nihilo by the “Founding Fathers” on the basis of rational principles. According to the dream, those principles live on today, and continue to form the basis for the continuing existence of the American state as the result of a kind of necessity rather than historical contingency. The American dream is, in this sense, a sort of semi-religious “covenant” which never ages because it is constantly renewed by the adherence of each individual American to the social contract.