Tea at Trianon: Pornography and Deicide

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, February 22, 2009

Pornography and Deicide

Robert R. Reilly explores the connections between pornography, murder, and social disorder. To quote:

Pornography has been deliberately used as a social and political dissolvent during periods of revolutionary change. To prepare for the French Revolution, the radical Jacobins flooded Paris with pornography. Who would know the politics of pornography better than that greatest of pornographers, the Marquis de Sade? De Sade desired to indulge his sexual passions without moral restraint and saw clearly what that ultimately meant. In The Philosophy of the Boudoir, de Sade wrote that the murder of King Louis XVI was insufficient to bring about the desired revolutionary freedom. The morality of the social and political order had survived the King's beheading. How could it finally be destroyed? In the first known use of the phrase, de Sade wrote that the murder of the King must be followed by the "murder of God." Only when the morality represented by Divine Kingship was abolished could man express himself in the fullness of pornographic existence. This would include, after regicide and deicide, homicide. De Sade perceived and approvingly depicted in his works the inexorable logic of pornography: sex outside of the moral order ultimately leads to murder and death. The Marquis would not be surprised by the FBI study on homicide that found that pornography is the most common interest among serial killers. As one convicted murderer and child molester told the Meese Commission: "[Pornography's] effect on me was devastating. I lost all sense of decency and respect for human life."

tubbs said...: deSade was 'off his rocker', and for that matter, so were many of the revolutionaries. It's kind of scary when a bunch of sickoes get together-it makes for genocide, among other atrocities.
I was not aware of a surge in popularity of porn in pre- revolutionary France, other than the politically motivated trash designed to libel the monarchy. Since porn intrinsically degrades women, and since the revolutionaries and their movement were deeply misogynistic---it all kind of makes sense, doesn't it? This blog reader is no scholar, and would appreciate any scholarly comment/direction on this subject.
re political porn: How prescient! How diabolically brilliant!---- I've never been able to understand how even our conservative courts have been able to rule in favor of porn in the name of "free speech". Now I understand a little better; tie it all in with the right to dissent. The Advesary wasn't dumb in the eighteenth century and he isn't dumb now.; February 22, 2009 at 2:53:00 PM EST