Tea at Trianon: The Throne of Glory

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

Friday, July 16, 2010

The Throne of Glory

The daughters of St. Teresa during the Reign of Terror. More HERE. Share

7 comments:

lara77 said...: This where my deep loathing of the French revolution manifests itself.These nuns who dedicated their lives to God were guillotined because of their religion and devotion to his late Majesty, King Louis XVI. The hypocrisy of the French revolution was never so blatant. I think of how Robespierre and Danton met the same fate they decreed to others. I keep hearing the words of Jesus, "He who takes up the sword shall perish by the sword." AMEN; July 20, 2009 at 7:44:00 AM EDT
May said...: This is very moving, these holy nuns displayed such sublime heroism amidst utter horror. May they intercede for us in Heaven.; July 20, 2009 at 6:34:00 PM EDT
Anonymous said...: I would caution us to reducing the violence done to clerics and religious to some latent antipathy to religion - in those times the Church and its institutions was a holder of large amounts of land that those who would reward their patrons coveted. Marie Antoinette's own brother Joseph II expropriated vast domaines from Monastic orders in K-u-K Austria - like Napoleon, he attributed no worth to idle contemplation and foresaw more lucrative - ie utilitarian - uses for the spaces occupied by the religious. He didn't execute them, but he did expel them from the only home they knew. Many were forced to abandon their vocations and fend for themselves. Some found positions in other houses of their orders, or as chaplain or tutors to sympathetic Aristocrats in the lands more distnat from the Imperial center, ie the slavic Polish and saxon Moravian landed gentry, their voices long since lost to history behind the Iron curtain...

I expand on this train of thought under a post on latter-day liberal (in the good sense, ie not enlightened Josephinism) K-u-K aristocrat Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt Leddihn here:
http://insightscoop.typepad.com/2004/2010/07/free-stuff.html#comments

The witness of these brave women echoes down the centuries a principle still controverted over to this day, a proper awareness of the antecedence of the economy of grace in human affairs.
Clare Krishan; July 17, 2010 at 8:25:00 PM EDT
Anonymous said...: e.g. this the former Premonstratenian Monastery at Klosterbruck in the present day Czech Republic
http://www.znovin.cz/article.asp?nArticleID=25
founded in the 12th Century, but nationalized in the 18th by the Catholic Imperial State for military training purposes... yikes!; July 17, 2010 at 8:33:00 PM EDT
elena maria vidal said...: Yes, Clare, it was awful what Joseph did in the Empire to the contemplative orders. I will never forget my visit to Austria and being shown monasteries that he had closed down. But then Joseph was very much into the new ideas. He may not have officially been a freemason but he was very influenced by their point of view. His mother would not have approved and I am sure most of his sisters did not approve. Thanks for the link to the Kuehnelt-Leddihn article!; July 17, 2010 at 8:41:00 PM EDT
Anonymous said...: and here
http://www.rotrekl.cz/z_louka.htm

sorry Babelfish has got the Glagolithic tongues down pat yet... my husband's Grandfather emigrated from a Hungarian hamlet hence our unusual patronymic (misspelled by the Ellis Island authorities, for they weren't familiar with transcribing Romanian S virgula in Crișan - meaning golden(*) from the placer gold deposits of the region the river is named after
___
* can also be sunburst red (Krzna in Russian) or resplendant, glorious (Krazna in Polish) depending on the linguistic context, in classical times, even into the 13th C Aristotolean-Thomistic synthesis, scientists assumed Gold was deposited by rays from the sun, silver from radiation from Venus, e.g Srebrenica =Silver-victory, and why the Russians, Ottomans and French were so keen on gaining hegemony over the Eastern flanks of the Holy Roman Empire with all its mineral deposits, Spain had South America, Britain had East Asia); July 17, 2010 at 8:54:00 PM EDT
elena maria vidal said...: Fascinating! Thank you for the contribution!; July 17, 2010 at 9:10:00 PM EDT